Independence Day cocktail: Watermelon & basil vodka martini

I called this a martini as it is nothing more than vodka with a splash of flavouring, but of course it would have a classically trained bartender raising an eyebrow at its presumption.

It's so simple, so fruity, so...thoroughly restorative that it seems perfect as a cooks pickmeup/reward for slaving over the barbecue(grill) on a sunshine-y day.

There are plenty of recipes kicking around for watermelon cocktails that require simple syrups (gomme) and various other ingredients, but this is so simple a child could make it. Not that I recommend that infants play with vodka but you get my point.

For two short glasses hack off a piece of watermelon about six inches long, chop it up, pick out the seeds, and squish it through a sieve, a juicer or any kind of press. (I found some random press in the kitchen whose usage remains obscure.)

Finely chop a handful of basil leaves, reserving a couple for decoration (maybe not the ones that look snail nibbled as in my glass above), and divide the leaves between the two glasses. Add three or four ice cubes & pour over a lovely big shot of frozen vodka (I used Grey Goose) and top with watermelon juice.

It's hardly a recipe but damn it tastes deeeeeelicious.

(If you wanted to get all fancy pants, you could macerate the basil leaves in the vodka overnight to really infuse the basil flavour, but I am waaaay too lazy.)

Happy Independence Day my American friends

Image: Flag dress by Catherine Malandrino

Object of desire: vintage style necklace

The Garden Statement Necklace from Banana Republic $98

Fried courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta, mushrooms & thyme

When we went shopping at Delicious Orchards for all the ingredients for Y's birthday dinner we saw these courgette (squash) blossoms on our way to the till:

Y was looking longingly in their direction so, ignoring the $9.99 sign we picked out eight of them. Which ended up costing a breathtaking $1.50.

I'd dredged up a memory of seeing them stuffed with ricotta, then shallow fried. So I beat together ricotta with an egg, & salt & pepper and added some cooled down sautéed minced mushrooms with garlic and thyme to add a little bite.

Stuffing them with a teaspoon is messy, and I'll use an icing bag next time, but eventually I got the flowers filled (and the counter decorated with) the ricotta mixture. I made a simple tempura batter with a cup of cold water, a cup of flour & an egg, mixing it together so there were still some lumps in the mixture. Then, holding each flower by the stem, they (& my fingers) were coated in the batter and then fried three at a time in an inch of hot oil.

They worked out fine, light & cheesy & crispy, with a little bite of courgette at the stem end, but next time I will add some finely grated Parmesan and some soaked chopped porcini to the ricotta mixture for a more intense flavour.

Grilled cheese, salad, vinaigrette, courgette flowers - not one of my finer food pictures, but you get the idea...

Book of the day: Chastened: No More Sex in the City

Released this week in the United Kingdom, I think Chastened: No More Sex in the City
by literary critic & journalist Hephzibah Anderson would be a great addition to any bedside pile of reading material. (And that's not just because she's a friend.)

The book is a memoir, covering the year that she decided to give up on sex voluntarily and explore what it really means to be chaste in a sex fulled world. Her twelve months of dates, temptation, frustration - and excuses is chronicled in her intelligent, witty voice, and her writing never fails to engage.

She wrote about some of the experiences of writing Chastened in The Guardian here. You can buy Chastened: No More Sex in the City
at a greatly reduced launch price by clicking on the book title in this post. It comes out in America next Spring, published by Viking.

Luella as Minnie Mouse

I find this photograph of my godson Oliver's little sister at her 3rd birthday party in London last month just the most immensely cheering thing. I also covert her Mouse ears.

I had very few days in London on that trip, spending most of my time in the country with my mother and the hounds. But I did sneak away for 24hrs, to lunch in the garden with Tara & her family, and eat her wonderful homemade strawberry ice cream,

to play in the garden afterwards with my goddaughter Amelia

and her baby brother,

to go dancing with my girlfriends at Guilty Pleasures, and then to see A & A and baby Carter, before finally heading for infant overload and Clare's BRILLIANT homemade birthday cake.

And then I slept for two days.

Y's (French, dedicated carnivore) birthday supper menu

I had volunteered to cook everything, not just pudding, for Y's birthday, if he would tell me what he wanted to eat. Sitting on the sun-filled deck at lunchtime, eating bowls of my homemade leftover Thai curry, he came up with the following menu of things he loved and I added a few things too:

Discs of grilled New Jersey goats cheese with walnuts on sourdough toasts with a mustard vinaigrette, fried pancetta & frisée (endive) salad

Roast pork tenderloin, wrapped in smoked bacon (Which Y cooked to his special recipe)
Green beans, steamed & then tossed in melted butter, thyme & garlic
Mashed Idaho potatoes (cream, butter)
Cauliflower cheese, gratinéed (crispy crumb topping)
Homemade apple sauce

Instead of cake he opted for strawberry tart with creme patissiere & strawberry puree.

The whole menu took three hours from unpacking the shopping to putting on the table. For such a super simple menu, there was an awful lot of prep as we made everything from scratch from the fried breadcrumbs on the cauliflower cheese to the salad vinaigrette. (And I also added an extra element to the first course, dropping the walnuts and adding deep fried courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta & mushrooms.)

[I read on Obamafoodorama that the US pork industry has suffered badly from shoppers (erroneously) eschewing piggy products due to Swine Flu. Not in this household is all I can say. There were barbecued pork escalopes the night before, and sausages tonight.]

Tarte aux Fraises: Strawberry tart with strawberry puree

We celebrated Y's birthday yesterday with a supper for four of us, which I cooked as part of my present for him. The piece de resistance was pudding, a classic French fruit tart with a strawberry puree.

I made this! I'm beside myself with glee. My first ever fruit tart!

Whilst I've been making classic quiches for years with great success, I've always been a little scared of making a proper patisserie type tart before. They require two ingredients which are notorious for going wrong: pate brisée, an extremely short, buttery pastry (which can be a pig to work with as, if you get it too short, it has to be pressed into place rather than rolled) & creme patissiere, proper confectioner's custard (which splits if you so much as look at it the wrong way).

It doesn't help either that my mother makes extraordinarily good pastry, and thinks nothing of knocking up a tart at the last minute. Leave it to the experts I've always said, or do as the French and buy one from your local patisserie.

So, I've never made pate brisée or creme patissiere before. As I don't like hot eggy runny custard, I always presumed that I didn't like creme patissiere. How wrong was I? Last year I discovered that I loved it. After all what is there to dislike about a pastry filling that consists of eggs & sugar?

Anyway Y intimated that a tart would be extremely acceptable as a birthday cake, and I didn't like to admit that I'd never made one before. I consulted their rows & rows of cookbooks. Of course, the baking book, Gateaux de Mamie, would be in French, and there was no recipe for tarte aux fraises, or strawberry tart. Still nothing daunted, I found the separate recipes for pate brisée and creme patissiere & set to work.

And blimey, if they weren't the most ridiculously simple things to make. (If you ignore the fact that i had to keep converting the measurements to Imperial on my Blackberry.) Ignoring the instructions to make the pasty by hand, I just threw the pastry ingredients (flour, an egg yolk, icing sugar, a little salted water) into the Magimix, keeping an eagle eye on it so the pastry wasn't overworked. The moment it came together I dumped it onto a floured board, pushed it into a ball, wrapped it in clingfilm and popped it in the fridge to rest for an hour.

The custard was even easier. I had to wing it a bit as the recipe called for French soup spoon measurements & I had no idea if this equated to tablespoons, so I just guessed that it might. I heated 500ml of whole milk with a splash of Bourbon vanilla, meanwhile beating together four egg yolks with 6 tbsps of icing sugar and 4tbsps of cornflour. When the milk was simmering, I slowly dribbled the egg mixture onto it, whisking away. It immediately thickened into perfect creme patissiere. I scooped it into a dish & left it to cool. And that was it.

After the pastry rested I rolled it out to a disc an inch wider than the 26cm greased, nonstick, fluted,loose bottom. metal tart tin, (why on earth do people use china tart dishes? Makes for soggy pasty), flipped it into the tin, pressed it into shape and trimmed the top. No baking parchment or baking beans to weight the pastry as it cooked so it wldn't rise, so I improvised with tinfoil and rice. Baked it at 180C/350F for 25mins (the book said 15 but it was still soft then), and slid it off the tin base and onto a wire rack to cool.

I did slightly overcook it, but better browner & crisper than pallid & soggy I guess. When the pastry shell was cool I tipped in & spread out the custard, and spent a fun 5 minutes decorating with half inch slices of strawberries, blueberries & raspberries.

I had a punnet of just going over strawberries in the fridge, so I used my mother's technique of hulling them, cutting off the bad bits, & throwing them in the Magimix with some sugar and lemon juice. Whizzed into a puree, this is ambrosial.

Gratifyingly, the boys all had second helpings.

The Aston Martin Cygnet

I love driving. It's up there on my list of favourite occupations. Whilst I was in California if I heard about a road with a mountain pass I was so there, even if it meant a massive detour. I like the feeling of being in control, I love the speed & the escapism, and I ended up covering over 4000 miles in the seven weeks I spent in California.(And no speeding tickets. Helps being English when you get stopped.)

Given my family's tastes, it's hardly surprising: my father is a complete petrolhead, who races classic cars, my sister bought herself a sports car when she was a banker & my mother drives something very fast and German.

My dream car has always been a 280SL, more for its gorgeous styling than its engineering and, although I don't want to drive anything that can't overtake a tractor, (although I would make an example for a Cinquecento or a 2CV), the way a car looks is important to me. Certainly as important as the marque.

Which brings me neatly to the just announced new addition to the Aston Martin stable.

The Cygnet.

Yup, joining the ranks of the ravishingly beautiful Vanquish and the Vantage is the Cygnet. Maybe they've called this staggeringly ugly car a Cygnet in the hope that it might grow up to be something more beautiful one day.

As the piece in today's Times points out, car companies can no longer afford to rest on their drooping laurels. They must innovate or wither away. But is this £20,000 ($35,000) entry level car that looks like a first cousin to the Ford Ka the way to go for a company known for luxury & speed?

Moonwalk for Michael June 09: the video

I don't think any of us expected to spend Friday afternoon organising an open air dance tribute to Michael Jackson in New York's Washington Square Park. Or that it would actually happen.

At 10.19am on Friday a group email arrived from S. As a fervent Michael Jackson fan he couldn't believe that no one had thought to organise a flash mob gathering in New York like the one at London's Liverpool Street.

We drew a blank on Twitter and on Google. And so our own NYC Mass Moonwalk was born.

With a hard core of maybe five of us, (French, Spanish, English & American in a staggering show of entente cordiale) we fixed on a location, Washington Square Park. But we still had the problem of how we were going to play music loud enough for a crowd to dance to. We didn't think a boom box was going to cut it,

Then T had a brainwave: the French Embassy's Cultural Services arm was organising an open air screening of The Big Blue at 8pm. Maybe, if he asked nicely, they would let us use their sound system for half an hour beforehand.

Astonishingly they agreed. (More entente cordiale.) So we started flooding Twitter & Facebook with updates, I blogged on here so it wld register on Google searches, and we all emailed friends, random acquaintances and various press to let them know of our plans.

Within half an hour it was obvious that we had struck a chord. So one of the girls designed & printed off 200 flyers, someone else printed up some T shirts, and we prayed for good weather.

Not hard enough. At 7pm the heavens opened and dumped a bucket of torrential rain over lower Manhattan. We were convinced no one would turn up. But apparently the French Embassy have their own weather sonar system and assured us that a) it would stop raining at 730pm &b) they had no intention of cancelling their screening.

Ambitious thinking as it was still raining at 7.25pm.

And then, miraculously, the sky started to clear from the west, and the rain stopped. We hung about, maybe fifteen of us, practically outnumbered by media & film crew wielding notebooks & cameras, as we thrust flyers at passers-by and wondered if we would be the only ones dancing.

We needn't have worried. By the time we played Thriller the Moonwalk had kicked off and we had a huge audience dancing, singing & laughing along. We even managed to find ourselves a choreographer, actor Matthew Chai who led the dancing for us.

RIP Michael Jackson

If you can't access YouTube, click here

My new abode

It's somewhat of a culture shock to go from this old tenement building in Chelsea:



To this:



It even has a mailbox for goodness' sake. (This is a novelty for an Englishwoman.)

Fake tan: the horror edition

Dearest Belgian Waffling,

I have read your blog on Fake Tanning whilst drunk and all I have to say is that I raise you a mottled forearm
and two stained feet.

What is worse is that I PAID to have this done to me in a spray tan booth at Solar Salon in Chelsea on Friday. And that I am now living with a French man who exclaimed, 'putain' when he saw my arms. He & his husband then laughed at me for three blocks. And a large part of supper.

Love LLGxx

The post where I arrive in New Jersey

Safely ensconced in what passes for countryside in New Jersey. There are deer in the cornfields and rabbits frolicking on the front lawn. The house is a clapboard neo-Colonial dream and I have a bed so large and so high that I feel like the princess in the fairy tale The Princess & the Pea.

The bed is wonderful but I am afraid that I was more than a little distracted by the Welcome LLG hamper on my bedside table:

Jammy Dodgers! Proper Baked Beans! Fruit Pastilles! Choccy Digestives! Toffee Crisp! (Okay that one's missing from the photograph. I ate it approx 5 secs after entering my room for the first time.)

If I was at all worried about being a burden or an awkward guest then this utterly brilliant & over the top gesture completely set my mind at rest. Bless the boys.

Cathartic clearing out

So it's all change today. I woke up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, am spending the day in Manhattan moving, and will go to sleep in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Not exactly what I had planned for the weekend.

But there's always a silver lining: I get to stay with two of my great friends from London and their dog Max. Their house is near the beach, they are letting me bring my bike, and I get to explore a different part of the East Coast. I just wish that moving house didn't always involve lugging cases up & down umpteen flights of stairs. This time tho, I have GG &Y who are arriving shortly to help move the heavy stuff into their SUV and thence to storage.

I've already done one trip this morning on my bike to the storage facility, narrowly escaping death on the mean streets of Chelsea when one of the several bags I suspended from the handlebars got caught in the wheel spokes & I came to an abrupt halt.

I spent an hour or so in the container, going through my cases & boxes, primarily hunting for my father's birthday present which seems to have escaped, but also going through everything.

One of the frustrations of living in New York is the sharp divide between the seasons. The winter is so wretched & cold, and the summer so steamy & hot that you require two completely separate wardrobes: furs, cashmere, scarves, boots as opposed to shorts, thin silk dresses & paperweight sandals. So I have two huge bags just filled with winter stuff in there as well as a case of winter shoes.

Or I did until this morning. There's stuff in those bags that's moved from London to New York, gets unpacked every September, hangs untouched in my wardrobe for six months and then gets packed up again. So I grabbed everything I haven't worn for two seasons and put it aside for The Salvation Army. As well as binning two bags of old underwear, & fifteen or so pairs of shoes that really were beyond the ministrations of a cobbler.

I cannot tell you the joy of getting rid of things. I am such a squirrel and I need to learn not to hoard unnecessarily. This was a very good step in the right direction.

Euphemism of the day

One of the things that I miss about England is the way we hide behind words. That's not to say that I don't like the American way of being direct, of having no social fear about asking how much? with who? or why?, but that there can be a beauty in euphemism.

I passed this sign on a pub on London's Shoreditch High Street, on the way to the epic six hour lunch on the Shoreditch House roof deck that I, Belgian Waffling, Mrs Trefusis, MTFF and India Knight indulged in back at the beginning of May.

(If you haven't seen one of these signs before, it means it's a strip bar.)

A CELEBRATION OF THE KING OF POP in NYC: Moonwalk in Washington Square Park, New York

UPDATE: The French Consulate have a weather sonar and the storm will be done shortly. Moonwalk still on and so is the screening!



A CELEBRATION OF THE KING OF POP in NEW YORK / NYC

Join us for the NYC MASS MOONWALK today at 730pm Washington Square Park, New York

Go here for a step by step guide on how to Moonwalk

RIP Michael and thank you for the music

It's amazing how some entente cordiale can something together in hours: A very big thank you to the organizers of the Films on the Green festival and the girls from the French Consulate for letting us use their sound system before the 8pm open air screening of Le Grand Bleu/ The Big Blue in the Square tonight

Building blocks for my summer wardrobe

I was whinging only a few weeks ago about having nothing to wear. So, having been utterly depressed by the scant nature of my summer wardrobe (worn out pieces, changing body shape), I finally took a step towards replacing the items I wear everyday (my bleach splashed shorts and crumpled tops).

After some thought, I've decided that this summer I will be wearing short-ish shorts with blousey tops and classic white shirts, with wedges for smart and strappy flat sandals for everyday, along with just above the knee Bermudas with stiletto strappy sandals for smart.

Hallelujah for the sales is all I can say. After scoping out & trying on all the pieces I wanted in Banana Republic & Old Navy, I took a squint on-line. I really do not understand this group's pricing. Old Navy white denim shorts that were $22.50 in store were $5 on-line, and the same at Banana: a cute cardigan that will work brilliantly in LA was originally $79, $41 in store & $27 on-line. And I'm thrilled that the Banana Martin shorts are suit cut, with a little stretch and twice the quality I'd expect at the price point.

Suffice to say that, with free shipping over $150, I bought everything on-line & got it delivered to New Jersey. This is what I got:
Old Navy
Blue-Gray Women's Cuffed Twill Shorts (5") $24.50 reduced to $5 (full price in store)
Bright White Women's Mid-Rise Denim Shorts (5")$19.50 reduced to $5 (FPIS)



Women's Sheer Roll-Up Camp Shirts in bright blue & in white $24.50 each (FPIS)



Women's Eyelet Sleeve Tops in navy, white & black $24.50 reduced to $15 each ((FPIS)



White Women's Mid-Rise Embroidered-Eyelet Shorts (5")$24.50 reduced to $5 (FPIS)

Blue & white Martin 4-inch striped short $44 reduced to $16.99 ($25 in store)
Black Martin 4-inch short $44 reduced to $29.99 ($25 in store but sold out)



Grey Heather Long 4-button cardigan $79 reduced to $29.99 ($41 in store)

Eleven pieces for $190. Not bad. (Plus I bought the Martin shorts in olive & in navy in store for $25 each as they are sold out on-line, & I know I will wear these everyday.)

Remember The Times

Home video players were still not that widespread when Thriller was released, and the idea of showing a video at a birthday party was almost revolutionary. My best friend Claire Awcock's big sister had rented Thriller for us to watch at her party and we sat, mesmerised, and a little scared by the graveyard scenes, not really understanding what we were seeing, but loving the music all the same.

With hindsight we were a couple of years too young to really get Michael in all his magnificence but I remember that afternoon so, so clearly. I must have seen thousands of movies since then but no film from the first twenty years of my life has stuck in my mind the way Thriller did. The costumes, the make-up, the idea of a proper story set to music: it's hard to get across just how revolutionary this all was in 1983-4.

Image from 1OAK's e-flyer this evening celebrating Michael

No more burgers

Oh God. I tried on some shorts today in glamorous Old Navy in my usual size and they were a little tight around my middle. So I hopped it across to banana Rpublic on Fifth Avenue. Same story.This is not good. I refuse to go up a size.

So, I did my usual act upon realising I need to stop eating: I walked up a couple of blocks to Madison Park where my beloved Shake Shack resides. As I sat there twittering about Michael Jackson (RIP), I shovelled in crinkle cut fries and a shroom burger. Strange to think that I will probably always remember eating that burger because of Michael Jackson.

It's all salad from now on.

Jersey Girl

Well, yesterday was quite something. After the morning’s broadside from my soon to be ex-flatmate & friend, I spent the day frantically emailing around Manhattan looking for somewhere else to live. Although my rent is paid up until next Tuesday, I’ve really no desire to stay here a moment longer. The irony is that she wants me out so that she can be ‘safe’ in her home, yet she’s made me feel so unsafe here that I am desperate to leave,

Because, believe me, what you read yesterday was the measured view. I laughed when I read the comment from one girl who thought I was harsh writing that entry. To her, I say, you can have no idea what really happened, and that what you read there is merely the tip of a very large iceberg. If she can accuse S of potential violence & stalking after one contact in two months, then I wanted a public record of what was happening.

Anyway, I have been inundated with offers of help for which I am very grateful. I have decided to stay with R tonight as we are going to a dinner party together, & then lovely F, talented designer & good friend has offered the keys to her Greenpoint, Brooklyn place until Sunday morning. Then les gars (GG&Y)



>are leaving Max, their over sized Bassett hound behind,

and driving in from their Macmansion in the wilds of Jersey in their gas guzzling behemoth of a car to help me put my things into storage and take me back to their lair.

Yup, that’s right. I am to be a Jersey Girl for a while. GG had suggested I go stay with them this summer when he & I were propping up the bar at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco but I had already arranged to stay here. I didn’t want to let X down, so refused GG’s offer. (She laughs dryly.)

And, best of all, he & darling Y have been happily married for A Very Long Time, so no potential emotional warfare there. I don't think I can face any more of that.

Someone find me a nice new place to live in Manhattan

Whilst I was in Los Angeles, one of the things that reassured me about returning to Manhattan was that back in March I had arranged my accommodation for the summer: I was to sublet a room in Chelsea until the middle of August. It was convenient, well-located and very inexpensive.

I based my plans, work, fiscal, social, around this, and arrived back in New York ten days ago. I unpacked, gradually removed my possessions from storage, settled in.

The fly in the ointment? My flatmate was the emotionally fragile ex-girlfriend of my best friend, S, & I had met her through him. Not an ideal situation; the breakup, two months ago whilst I was in LA, was complicated and messy, as most break ups are and there was a lot of emotional fallout. There is no right or wrong in a break up. S is no saint but then neither is she. They no longer speak.

But, we are all adults and I thought that, as I was just here for six-eight weeks, that we would be able to deal with this. On my first night back I told her that I was Switzerland, completely neutral. The problem, tho, was that she wanted to talk about it. A lot. Has been, frankly, unable to stop talking about it in the eleven days we have been here together. I do not wish to talk about it. Ever. I'm already dealing with my parents' breakup. But I listened, and nodded along as she was clearly distressed.

I am empathetic: as a single girl, I’ve had to be a shoulder for a lot of people, and one cannot fail to be sorry for anyone trying to come to terms with the end of a relationship that they thought might be The One. It’s miserable, throws one’s equilibrium out, and makes the world feel like a hostile place. However much I love my friend S, I can’t help but feel sorry for this girl & her emotional turmoil.

Hell, I’ve been there myself. After one heart wrenching break up I did all of the following: posted every photo I possessed of him though his letterbox, sent rambling letters, drove convoluted journeys home so that I could drive by his house, frantically Googled him to find out what he’d been doing, and basically acted like a nutcase.

But it passes. I look back now and cannot believe either that I even liked him, or that I would behave in such a way. And I hope that I am old & wise enough now not to fall for the kind of unfaithful cowards who would induce such behaviour.

Unfortunately, my flatmate is still in the throes of the nutcase stage. This morning she informed me that, as she had passed by S at the subway when he had come by to pick me up for dinner, it was no longer possible for me to live here & that I needed to move out by the 30th June. She was also considering a restraining order against S as he obviously can’t keep away from her.

I had promised her that I would never have S in the house which seemed fair enough to me (& he has zero desire to come in anyway) but, with hindsight, if I had realised it would distress her so much, it wld have been better not to have met S on the street outside the apartment last night.

But a restraining order? And evicting me? A normal person would have said, LLG you were a bit insensitive last night. Please don’t meet S where I might bump into him, not turn it into an accusation of stalking. The whole thing is utterly ludicrous: in two months he has got in touch with her once: on Monday he emailed, texted & then left her a missed call after he had found out a few things about her which upset him, and he has picked me up for dinner from my home once.

I’m aggrieved because, whilst I was inadvertently insensitive by allowing her ex to pick me up from my doorstep, I wld do anything to ensure a woman's safety. Regardless of my friendship with S, if I for a moment thought there might be even a scintilla of risk to her I would back her every step of the way.

But in this case I am afraid that right now the only risk to her is her own imagination.

And evicting me because she needs her home to be a ‘safe’ environment (God I hate therapy speak) is patently absurd. But if it makes her feel more secure, then so be it. And maybe it is too much for her having one of S’s friends around her. That’s fine: I’m thoroughly bored with her games, accusations and character assassinations and with the whole situation. Clearly, I am much better off out of the apartment and out of her life.

Now I have six days to find a new place to live. Curses.

Object of desire

The Pashley Princess Sovereign $1195. Only to be ridden in Manhattan if you have an elevator or a garage to chain it up in. Waaay to heavy to carry upstairs, and a magnet for thievery. But, oh so beautiful.

Recipe: Cauliflower & mushroom soup with fried Halloumi cheese

Whenever I have deadlines to meet I cook incessantly. Every meal becomes an exercise in flashy knife skills & obscure ingredients. Although the latter is as much to do with the fact that I won’t allow myself to leave the house until the copy is filed and so must cook with whatever is in the cupboards.

In London that didn’t really present much of a challenge as I had a superb kitchen bursting with supplies. Here in New York it’s like playing Ready Steady Cook. I have a third of a kitchen cupboard for dry ingredients and a very small fridge & icebox, and that usually means that I eat everything before going shopping again. I have no room for the standard essentials: no flour, no sugar, and certainly none of the esoterica with which I filled my London shelves. And I never really plan what to eat in advance: I just buy what looks good in the markets.

Last night all I had left were some distressed looking mushrooms, a small cube of Halloumi cheese, an onion & a small head of cauliflower. To be completely honest, I do live opposite the Westside Market, a very good food store, but it was raining, the apartment is a fifth floor walk-up and I hadn’t brushed my hair since the day before.

So, I scratched my (unbrushed)head for a while. I’d run out of starches, milk, tinned tomatoes and coconut milk, so there were no sauce ingredients to bring it all together, and nothing to bulk it out. Then I remembered a meal I had thrown together for my mother last month in England: a cauliflower soup with fried mushrooms and Halloumi,

Fortunatley for this post, I photographed all the food I cooked in England, so I can give you a proper recipe below. I had chopped coriander there, so that's added too. It works like this:

Chop up the onion & a clove of garlic if you have it. Find a big saucepan (big is good, you’ll see why in a minute), put in a splash of whatever oil you have kicking around, & a knob of butter if you have it, turn the heat to medium and, when the oil is hot, add a tsp of ground cumin, a tsp of haldi (turmeric) & a tsp of garam masala. Cook the spices in the oil for 30 secs, and then throw in the onions.

Keep the heat at low-medium – you want the onions to cook slowly, without browning. Push them around in a desultory way with a spatula from time to time to check that they aren’t sticking. In between prodding the onions, chop up the cauliflower into pretty small pieces (removing the stalk & outer leaves) and rip up the coriander and, when the onions are translucently soft, throw in the cauliflower rubble & the chopped coriander.

Then you need a about a litre/ 1.5 pints of hot liquid. (It's going to depend on the size of your cauliflowers - you need the liquid to come just over the pieces.) Stock is best (I like using Marigold Vegetable Bouillon - it doesn’t taste too processed), but water wld do in a pinch. Pour this over the cauliflower and cook till the cauliflower is super soft. This can take about 10 minutes.

Whilst the cauliflower is cooking, chop up the Halloumi into teeny cubes, heat up a frying pan on the stove, with a tsp of oil and when it looks hot, throw in the cheese. After 10 secs, push them about a bit. The aim to get them nicely browned. (You don’t need much oil for this). When they are done, tip them out onto kitchen paper and try to resist eating them all. Good luck with that.

You also need to chop up the mushrooms into small pieces, and fry these in butter (preferably), or else olive oil, with a pinch of salt, over a medium heat until they are cooked. (It's good to not boil away all the juices.)

The fun part. And the reason why you need a big saucepan. Get out your stick blender and whizz that cauliflower to a soup consistency. It won’t form a puree, what you will get is a thin-ish liquid with teeny tiny pieces of cauliflower in it. If it looks too thin, bubble it up on the stove to reduce the liquid; equally, if too thick, add some more stock/hot water.

Season generously to taste with lots of black pepper & Maldon (kosher) salt.

To serve, ignore the dog who will have retired to the sofa in high dudgeon upon realisation that there is no meat in tonight's supper:

and put the Halloumi in the bottom of the soup bowls:

Pour over the cauliflower soup, and then spoon over the fried mushrooms. More chopped coriander looks & tastes good sprinkled over the top. Flat leaf parsley wld work too.

Eat, enjoying the contrast between the salty, crispy, melty cheese, the delicate cauliflower and the earthy mushrooms. (I do appear to be obsessed with cheese & mushrooms right now.)

Picture of the day: Posetta Baddog in the buttercups

Get Lashed London: Fake eyelash bars open

When I was at school I used to horrify my best friend Clare by rubbing off my mascara with my fingers when I was nervous, which frequently pulled my eyelashes out. I never listened to her and my once luxuriant eyelashes have never really grown back properly.

Around the same time our friend Caz introduced me to the brilliance of individual falsh eyelashes at a salon near Leicester, but we could only afford to get it done for really special occasions and, once I left school, I never found another salon that could apply them.

It wouldn’t be a problem if I had darker colouring, but I have all the colour of an albino bunny: a natural blonde with skimmed milk skin, & taupe eyebrows and lashes. At university, Clare taught me how to apply liquid eyeliner to help minimize the pink-eyed bunny look, but my sparse lashes need more help than makeup & tinting can provide.

Fast forward ten years or so.

I was a beauty editor, dealing with the knee high piles of products in padded envelopes around my desk. Once morning I shook out the contents of a bag onto my desk. Out fell a giftcard for individual falsh eyelash applications from make up store Pout. I was down there quicker than winking, and back again & again when I discovered that for fifteen odd quid individual fake lashes were go.

And then they stopped their beauty services. I shed a tear when I discovered that the only people who offered individual lashes in Central London were the ultra expensive long lasting services which cost upwards of two hundred pounds. I've learnt to apply strip lashes since, but they aren't entirely reliable when applied by me(read my disasters with them here.)

So I am extremely happy to hear about Get Lashed, the eyelash service equivalent of a nail bar. Which isn’t surprising because the concept has been developed by Nails inc. They can apply sixteen different styles of strip lashes, (£7.00 to £12.00 each with free application) in a choice of 16 styles and, hurrah, false lash extensions, priced at £30.00 (full sets) or £18.00 (outer corners). AND they do tinting, and brow threading & waxing.

I so know where my first stop is next time I'm back in England. And could someone please open a Get Lashed on Manhattan?

Get Lashed now available at Debenhams, Oxford Street, London; House of Fraser Bluewater and nails inc. South Molton Street and Bishopsgate
Further Get Lashed sites are planned for Debenhams stores nationwide

Mushrooms & mozzarella: LLG's guide to putting on weight rapidly

I am currently on a reducing regimen. Over the two weeks I spent at my mother's house in the country I was face down in the trough for at least 50% of the time, and put on 6lbs/3kg. In two bloody weeks!

The sheer, unadulterated bliss of having all the ingredients on hand to cook whatever I felt like, in my mother's wonderful, fully equipped kitchen with her as an enthusiastic participant to boot all added up to avoirdupois overload.

So, it's with this in mind, that I share one of my all-time favourite recipes, which I cooked, er, three times whilst I was there. Dreamed up by myself one day in London when all I had in the fridge were mushrooms and a ball of mozzarella di bufala (random, I know), it's deliciously addictive and takes maybe ten minutes from prep to mouth. Sure, you can practically feel the fat cells multiplying on your thighs, but, sod it, we all need comfort food now & again.

It can be eaten with any starch. Basmati is good, mashed potato is other-worldly but turns it into a bit of a performance so I don't bother unless I have leftovers (or shhh M&S cook-chill), and I'm mainly using quinoa right now as it cooks so quickly. If using rice, put it on to cook before you start the main dish.

To start the journey to food heaven/hell (you decide), you need a couple of handfuls of as fresh as possible white mushrooms. (Look for mushrooms with gills as pink as possible, rather than dark brown: you want that lovely just yielding texture they get when cooked, as opposed to the sloppiness of week old ones.)

Then a ball of fresh mozzarella. It doesn't have to be buffalo:

But it does taste magnificent. But, please, whatever you do, do not use a brick of mozzarella or grated mozzarella as it doesn't melt in the right way for this dish. Or, heaven forfend, 'domestic' or Danish mozzarella. That stuff is just plain wrong.

Add a tablespoon of butter to the frying pan. Once melted, add some chopped garlic, and tip your mushrooms and a generous scattering of Maldon Salt (or kosher salt). Turn the heat down a little to let them cook.

The point here is to get them to release all those lovely mushroom-y juices, so you need to avoid reducing the liquid comes off them. You can always cheat and pop a lid over the frying pan for a few minutes (but not for too long, as steamed mushrooms always taste a bit weird).

Then tear (do not chop) your ball of mozzarella into the frying pan. This was a very large ball (am pig), you could easily use half this amount for the mushrooms shown. Turn the heat to very, very low.


And put the lid on your frying pan for about 3-4 minutes, until the pan looks like this. DO NOT STIR. This breaks up the mozzarella and you end up with a pan of string. Whilst the cheese is melting, pour boiling water over some quinoa in a saucepan and place a lid over it so it cooks quickly.

Drain the quinoa and add to pretty soup bowl, check seasoning of mushrooms & cheese, add black pepper (you want freshly ground here for the texture and the same goes with the sea salt), spoon delectable mixture & cooking liquor over quinoa. Shovel into mouth.
How many does this feed? Well, one of the reasons I got so porky was that I ate all the above on my own. But less greedy piglets could probably make the amount of mushrooms shown above stretch between two if you made a simple lettuce salad to go with it.

Happy Father's day!

Suzannah: Vintage inspired design

Eighteen months ago I wrote enthusiastically of Suzannah's wonderful debut collection, and I've been a fan ever since of her thoughtful and chic, often vintage couture inspired designs which frequently use vintage textiles.

(Parisian Coat Dress £380)
Her label is appealing on so many levels. The price point, as I wrote about here, is sensible, and her service is so personal that she can offer different solutions to the pieces in her collection: a specific garment length, a simple sleeve added or removed, a bespoke wrap to match, a swatch service with other colour ideas or print variation for many of the looks.

And I know it works, as I was thrilled to discover on one of my trips home that a wonderful friend of one had bought some semi-bespoke pieces from Suzannah on my blog recommendation.

I have fallen in love with her Petal Sculpt Dress, which could have been designed for my figure (long thin legs, no waist, lots of bosom):

And, I'm still lusting after the Future Tuck Jersey Dress, which has been reduced in the sale:

I was reading her blog this morning and was blown away by the couture wedding dress she designed recently. If you are in the market for a personal wedding dress, then Suzannah could well be your saviour.

Eating & dating: My first week back in Manhattan

I’ve been back in New York for ten days, & it’s rained every one of those ten days. Fortunately, as wellies are obviously impermeable, they are one of things that weren’t ruined in the employee-caused flood at Manhattan Mini Storage in Chelsea, so I fished them out of my locker and have been wearing them every day to splash around the streets.

That said, I’ve also been dating and, whilst my wellies are certainly practical, I’m not wearing them to dinner. This has led to several near arse over tit, knickers in the air moments as I’ve picked my way Downtown over wet, slippery cobblestones in stilettos.

Date number 1 was through my online dating site, & was the first person who’d got in touch with me for several months that I wanted to meet. We’d arranged a drink in New York whilst I was in Lausanne, which I then promptly forgot.

Still, I’m glad that he reminded me on the day as we had a hilarious conversation, fuelled by rather too much Pinot Noir, and I actually lost track of time, so much so that I ended up dashing from our date at SHO Shaun Hergatt's bar at The Setai by Wall Street to Café Select on Lafayette to meet a charming & brilliant English architect friend of a friend for dinner. I arrived a shockingly rude 45minutes late. Fortunately he had a friend from London in tow, and managed to recognise me when I finally pitched (I didn’t have a clue what he looked like), and we ended up having a hilarious evening of beer, perfect rosti and god knows what else.

A group of girlfriends & I convened at Double Crown on the Bowery for dinner on Tuesday. I gave the restaurant a rave review for a US publication when it first opened but it’s gone steadily downhill since. Sometimes the food is good, but the service is execrable, which takes the shine off the whole experience. Notable ballsups have included a two course meal which took 2 ½ hours to be served and was cold when it did arrive last November, and the sloppy, graceless service and tasteless shredded green bean salad on Tuesday. The whole sorry affair was rounded off by this episode at the bar afterwards.

(I should add though that I still believe that Double Crown’s interior is one of the best in NY. The bar is great for drinks, as is its sister bar Madame Geneva next door. Just order carefully in the restaurant and maybe take a good book & a sense of humour for the longueurs in service.)

Wednesday had one of the few sunny interludes of the week, and was warm enough for Francoise & me to take to the roof deck at Soho House. I live two blocks away & there's wireless access, so we’ve decided that it will be our summer office, and, when it finally stops raining, will be found most days under the third umbrella from the left, by the pool, in our bikinis, with laptop (me) & sketchpad (F). Was also very pleased to bump into charming architect & friend from Monday on adjacent sun loungers.

Having spent a large part of the previous days dealing with the aftermath of the storage container flood, I spent Thursday & Friday writing like a fiend, and emerged, blinking, for al fresco drinks with JK on, yup, the roof at Soho House. I know this is getting repetitive, but it is lovely up there, the people watching is second to none, it’s practically next door to my apt, and they do a sublime chili cilantro margarita that knocks your socks off after a hard day. So much so that we ditched our smart dinner plans and retired to PopBurger for burgers & fries instead.

And that was my first week back in Manhattan.