London’s Hidden Gems: Cheese

“Cheese – milk’s leap towards immortality.”
- Clifton Paul Fadiman

One of the places I showed J. was Neal’s Yard in Covent Garden, a hidden street only a short walk from his usual stomping ground but that he’d never heard of.  London is stuffed with places like this, it’s probably why I love it so much.  Neal’s Yard used to be just an old, unused area behind some buildings on Neal Street and Monmouth Street.  In the 1970′s Nicholas Saunders opened a series of businesses that soon attracted other shops and venues.  Today you can find homeopathic snuggled up alongside major brands, boutiques and pop up shops, and tons of character in every last one of them.

Walking into the yard proper is fun because the brick walls and windows are all painted bright colors, there are quirky shops specializing in everything from astrology to frozen yogurt, and you get the idea that you’ve walked into a big, confetti colored secret.  J. took a look around and declared, “You lead me into wardrobes,” which may be one of the cutest compliments ever uttered, as far as I’m concerned.

The point of our visit was that I wanted to glance through the Neal’s Yard Dairy, one of the best cheese shops in London and one of the places that has such a fun ambiance that you want to kidnap tourists from the normal places they’re herded into and show them an off-the-beaten-path good time.

Again, like most shops, it’s tiny but crammed to the brim with good stuff.  There are massive rounds of cheese stored along every wall, and a staff eager to slice off samples of their wares.

J. and I tried a few samples for the fun of it.  If ever you have sinus problems, let me recommend the Stinking Bishop – it’s about as potent as wasabi!

Each cheese is labeled by name, and more uniquely, the farm it was made at.  No processed stuff here, if you please!  This is an artisan’s shop, stocked by independent and family farms from all over Europe.  We got half a round of Tunworth, a Hampshire soft cheese which is (a staff member informed me) often referred to as an English Camembert.  It is delicious with gala apples.

It’s a fun treat place if you’re throwing a party and need a cheese platter, if you’re in the mood to experiment with gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, or if you just want to snag something to treat yourself with an alternate to sugar.

Neal’s Yard, minions.  Check it out.

*All photos mine.

London: More Good Eats

“I smell of rain, the ocean, and crêpes with lemon.”
- Les chansons d’amour (2007)

Just around the corner from the South Kensington tube station on Exhibition Road is a tiny little gem of a restaurant, the Kensington Crêperie.

As you may have guessed the specialize in crêpes, and all of them are delicious.  They also have specialty drinks (may I personally recommend the mint lemonade?) and in house made ice creams.

Most of the seating is outdoors, and lucky for us the weather was lovely.

The crêpes can be made with different flours, there are sweet and savory crêpes than work for every meal, and the ingredients are always fresh.

J., who needs to be fed every couple of hours, had already snagged his second or third meal of the day, and only needed a slight treat to get him through One Man Two Guvnors, so he had a Crêpes Suzette.  I was famished and got a Tartiflette Galette, stuffed with potatoes, bacon, cheeses, and a cream, onion, and white wine sauce.  Hearty and delicious!

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner is served!

The Crêperie is open seven days a week, minus the major winter holidays, and often will stay open until midnight if people are still lining up to buy.  The prices are very reasonable (between £3 and £9) and the portions are plenty big enough.  The savory crêpes usually contain at least four food groups, so don’t make the mistake of thinking this is just a place for a light brunch, you can get a lovely meal here and bask in the general splendor of one of London’s priciest and prettiest areas.

The Natural History Museum, the V&A, Kensington High Street (with fabulous shopping), Kensington Palace, the Royal Albert Hall, and Hyde Park are all just a stroll away, and you’re only a few tube stops from most of the major sites in London.  So, no excuses darlings.

*All photos mine

London: Good Eats

“I know all about you.  You’re the people waiting on the shoreline with the warm towels and the hot chocolate after the woman swims the English Channel.”
- Gwen Moore

Just across the street from the Inns of Court on Fleet Street is a small, unassuming coffee and tea shop that you must visit if you get the chance.  Modern though it is, it’s like most London shops in that while the innards have changed, the space allocated to them is straight out of the Middle Ages – tiny.  Good things, as our mottos goes, come in small packages, ducklings.

Scrumptious eats.

You can buy proper tea here, loose leaf and brewed, and they have lots of their own combinations to choose from as well as a few private tea companies’ offerings.

Drink Me.

The real treat though is the hot chocolate.  European hot chocolate is a totally different animal than the processed, sugar heavy packeted stuff you get in the States.  It’s usually made with real chocolate pieces to start, melted into milk and cream.  In Belgium I never had a pot of chocolate that I didn’t have sweeten myself with real sugar, and most prefer a minimum thereof.  You can find plenty of sugary, processed brews if that’s what gets you through the day, but everyone should have real hot chocolate at some point.  And if you can have it in London, so much the better!  At Get Coffee, you can choose your degree of cocoa saturation.  J. and I chose the 72% dark chocolate.   And it was magnificent.

Seriously. If you’re in town, try it. You’ll thank me later.

*All photos are my own.

This Would Be Funny…

…if it weren’t so accurate.  Behold the daily routine au chez Small Dog:

Some Perfidious Fiend…

“We should start a witch-hunt!’
- Daisy

Currently wailing in sackcloth over this thing...

…stole my favorite kitchen implement ever, my orange peeler!  The niftiest thing ever invented for a consummate citrus lover.  I left it with an orange to chill in our (fortified and limited access) dispatch room’s refrigerator and when I returned a couple hours later, it, my orange, several salad dressing packagers, and a bag of carrot sticks had been snatched.

In spite of the jokes and sitcom stories of this sort of thing, this is my first incident of food being stolen in nearly 3 years of office work.  Also, what sort of ruffian steals healthy food from the office fridge?  Aren’t the soda cans labeled “Property of T-Dawg” and the “secret” candy bars in the freezer usually the first to go?

So, orange peeler thief, you’re on notice.  Either return it unharmed and be spared, or suffer the vicious voodoo curse I am prepared to unleash on you!

Primordial. Soup.

“That’s disgusting…thanks for taking one for the team.”
“But I don’t want to take one for the team.  I want to leave the team to its moldy fate.”
- Student employee, C.

Hm, a nice little murder. Or maybe a drug bust? Heck, just a lost textbook!

One of the downsides of working at a university is that everything is time is cyclical.  The wheel of life and work turns by semesters and even though you are out of school, you are directly affected by this fact.  For example, I do most of my hiring and firing of students at the beginning of new semesters – kids graduate, have tough schedules, or sometimes even drop out and have to be terminated or replaced.  During Fall and Winter terms I’m involved with projects related to various athletic seasons.  When Spring and Summer terms roll around I, and others, will be beating our heads on our desks for whole weeks at a time for lack of work – you can only reorganize the supply closet, update your all of your forms, and rearrange your staplers so many times before you’re quite longing for heinous crimes to be committed.

But there is a sneaky week or two in the middle of every semester, after you’ve finished hiring all of your new students and finished your major projects, and just before you have to start ordering next month’s supplies and prep next term’s spreadsheets, that you are stuck.

It is at this soul numbing point that I start wandering about the office begging for work.  Susie is usually pretty good at giving me some filing or shredding, or handing one of her own projects over to me if she is swamped, but even her ideas can give out.  And so it proved this mid-Winter.

I had my annual employee evaluation and told her that since I began working here I’ve tried to streamline and improve processes and I’ve been successful – to the point that I regularly don’t have enough to do, especially during mid-term deadlock.  When she asked what sort of small project ideas I’ve come up with, I listed the various tasks I’ve given myself over the past year and declared without guilt that the idea well has run dry.  After a moment she said she had a job that needed doing but didn’t want to offend me by asking.  I told her I didn’t mind.

So today I spent an hour on hand and knees cleaning out the two refrigerators in the break area.

And let me just state for the record, there are mothers all over the United States today, wringing their hands and weeping as they try to figure out where they went wrong.

I pulled seven one litre bottles of soda that were up to a year old (and fermenting), three packages of cream cheese that had turned teal (and grown eyes), almost an entire pizza that had dried out months ago (and fossilized), and several tupperware filled with various rotting mush (that had apparently evolved highly enough to invent a rudimentary form of communication).  Let us not speak of the fish I found.  Really.  Let’s not.

Food Coma

Vegetables are a must on a diet.  I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread, and pumpkin pie.
~Jim Davis

Hello, darlings.  All alive out there, no major holiday-induced injuries?  Good.  We spent this holiday with J.’s family.  Wrestling with nephews, performing in a small Christmas concert organized by nieces, and eating!

Honestly, I can’t remember eating so much anytime in recent memory.  I struggle with eating enough, I just don’t get hungry very often – much to the confusion of my husband who marvels that I can survive on a diet that’s a fraction of his.  Small amounts of food fill a small body up…usually.

No more pie! Just leave me!

I went completely overboard this weekend!  Cinnamon Pecan French Toast, ham and piles of western potatoes (meaning slathered in sour cream, cheese, and onions), my culinary genius sister-in-law’s baked ziti, and not nearly enough salad.  To say nothing of the goodies that came in stockings.  And the candy scattered all over three houses.  Oh dear.

Which, as you may have guessed, means that the obligatory New Year’s diet starts a bit sooner this year.  The combined forces of Birth Control, laziness, and the all-consuming desire I have to hibernate in winter have turned my physique inside out and that ends today!

Maybe.

Food. Fights.

“I don’t like to eat snails.  I prefer fast food.”
- Roger van Oech

J. eats three or four times as much as I do.  He buys junk food and, if left to his own devices, would subsist on mac and cheese (the evil boxed kind that I like to think of as the spit of Satan), frozen burritos, and ramen bowls.  He chows down on hot dogs, burgers, and any form of fast food he can get his hands on.  If I don’t dish out dinner, he’d never eat vegetables.

Minor annoyance 1 – he’s LOST weight since we’ve been married

Minor annoyance 2 – I twit him about his eating habits from time to time, but now I’ve lost the right.  Our insurance pays for us to get our cholesterol, glucose, and other blood levels tested for free once a year.  Our results just came back.  He’s in perfect health.  Curses.

And Another Thing!

“Welcome to the Church of the Holy Cabbage.  Lettuce pray.”
- Anonymous

Additional perk to Interview Week social rounds: we have been given a full meal almost every night this week, that neither one of us had to make.  Although the caterers basically made us Thanksgiving dinner for one of them – stuffing, turkey, and pumpkin pie included.  The only reason we had to go to the store at all since Saturday was to get pasta sauce (because this overabundance of food has turned your friendly household C. into The Laziest Wife Ever and the only thing I did this week in the way of cooking was boiling pasta), and ice cream sandwiches.  Because we needed those.

Pictured: C.

Tea. Party. (No, not that kind!)

“There is no Latin word for tea?  Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.”
- Hilaire Belloc

Remember when Marie got engaged the Great Bridesmaid Dress Affair that followed?  Well the dresses have been chosen and they are to die for (check them out here).  And then think of that metallic green monstrosity with the horrid bow on the bum that your sister/university roommate/friend/sister-in-law made you don and weep.  Having friends with excellent taste is a great comfort.

Now, with dates set, gown ordered, and food presumably taken care of, it falls on us, the bridesmaids, to throw the most fabulous fête ever conceived by man.  This is going to be so grand and event that it’s taking three of us, coordinating from three separate states to get it going.

And what else would it be, than a traditional English Tea Party, dragged into the 21st century?  I’m in charge of food and sundry other tasks (as I’m currently the only one in the same state as the bride).

And, as Marie reads this blog, the following information will be have to be somewhat censored.  The menu will include (nothing to see here) and (move along) and of course (nuh-uh).  The decorations will be done all in (bleep) and (sound effect from Deadliest Catch), isn’t that gorgeous?  The girls and I have come up with a fantastic (lalalalala!) so we can (ahem) and Marie can enjoy the (sshhnnkk!  Message for you, sir!).

Aren't we informative?

Doesn’t it sound fabulous?