More Life

H'okay, so there was too much food. There was... way too much food. Well. I can freeze the bread and one of the boxes of tzimmes? x_x

In the end went with the baked fish with the cream sauce. Katy didn't love it, so shan't make it again, though I thought it was pretty nice, with its butter-basting, cream and crunch bread-crumb crust. I also braised the last of the old celery we needed to use or toss with it, and that went well.

The tzimmes, as per usual, promised a QUICK carrot cooking time and then even after I gave them another HALF HOUR, carrots: still too crunchy, fruit component: over-stewed. Ah well. Still nice. Have discovered I like a sweet rather than a sweet and savory version of this, though. Will omit the salt and pepper next time and let people add that individually, if they liked. Last year I had this as a nice breakfast a lot (there were leftovers aplenty), and was looking forward to doing so again, maybe with a lashing of cream, but this batch seems perhaps too savory for that.

Roasted two HUGE sweet potatoes, one sweet (brown sugar, unsalted butter, option of marshmellow fluff) and one savory (salted butter, paprika, salt and pepper).

In the end made apple cobbler from the Guardian's Ultimate Recipe. Not quite as ultimate as I'd been led to believe--not a perfect fruit to topping ration. Next time more fruit. I cut the caster sugar and substituted honey for a RH twist, and it worked very well, texturally and taste-wise!

I also made butterscotch apples from Leon: Baking. Unfortunately there's a step where, having made this hard-sauce toffee, you have to rest the pan in ice-water to halt the cooking process QUICKLY. In my nervous rush to not fail what's basically candy-making, a tricky business, I sloshed a little cold water into the pan. I thought I's scooped it all out, but I must not have done it right, because the caramel/butterscotch would NOT adhere thickly to the apples, and fuck did I try. I thought the wateryness might be gross, but the toping was too delicious to chuck, actually, and really the basin I used to cool the pot in was clean, I was just being overly precious in worrying about it. The molten butterscotch was boiling hot, it's not like any badness could have come in without having been incinerated, AND I scooped out the little water that infiltrated. Bah. Anyway, so the apples sort of have to be SMASHED into the hard sauce stuff, but are otherwise fine.

Will make earl grey applesauce another time. Also Peter brought WAY too much cider--have to find a stew or something that uses that. x_x

I got a HUGE migraine after finishing, had to take pills and lie down. Is it weird that I really enjoy Sue Perkins in The Great British Bake-off and the old nan who's part honeybadger in that she don't care, she just bakes what she wants?

I emailed my maybe-advisor a revised proposal last night after he told me at our meeting Monday that he'd like to see a few specific changes. Now too nervous to send out this proposal OR the other one to anyone else, because I have to see whether he thinks I've done this right. So I guess tomorrow's narrowing down Ox and Cam people, and job aps. Joy. I really just want to read the rest of Bleak House and Hard Times, the AWESOMELY CHEAP (seriously, 2 pounds and 5 pounds respectively, the latter with a TON of good supplementary academic materials) Dickens books I had to buy Monday at the UCL campus Waterstones when caught out without my power cord.

And I haven't wanted to say anything about this for fear of jinxing it, but it looks very much like Katy officially has the downstairs room as a tenant, and we have an absolute-for-sure subleaser. This should ease some of her tension about being an illegal tenant, eliminate the threat of someone moving in and giving us away, and do the subleaser a favor. Also enable us to get the cat. Huzzah! Still, my fingers are crossed against some last-minute catastrophe because I am paranoid, and I won't be happy until the lease goes through on Monday, even though our mad bat of a landlady has signed off and the deposit's being made tomorrow (from the subleaser to Katy to Mrs. Mad-Battums).

Still, this potential near-miss will hopefully teach me to be more careful in future.

I'll tell you all later what I've gotten up to in New York, but packing at the moment. Have Intriguing London Links to celebrate my arriving at 8 am tomorrow and (hopefully) clearing customs, about which I am unreasonably terrified. ...probably because I actually am doing something slightly shady. IF YOU HAVE YOUR OWN awesome London links, sites or recommendations, please do drop me a comment, and I will be as happy to include them in the general list as I will be to take you up on your suggestions.

London's Finest Bookshops -- a really good, contributory Guardian listing that doesn't seek to limit excellence to the London parallel of NewYork's 'the Strand,' or the equivalent of City Lights/Prairie Lights, all of which is what I was initially looking for.

London's Best Cheesemongers -- Time Out does a good Best of London culling generally, but this is clearly the greatest love of all. I mean. Cheese.

Shady Old Lady -- A user-edited selection of weird sites and sights about town, and potential routes for self-guided tours thereof. Occasionally dumb, often pretty great.

Derelict London -- I'm really drawn to the uncanny beauty of decaying urban architecture, and Derelict London is a good guide. What is /could/ use is better web design (which is odd considering the site is associated with a glossy, well-turned-out published book), more sensible organization as a whole, and better commentary, in terms of the history of the sites depicted, where to find them, and more essayistic content. That aside, it seems an invaluable resource for exhaustive documentation of the city, as thorough as the Wayback Machine.

Disused Stations on the London Underground -- Another case of Big Name, Book-Affiliated Website Apparently Designed With Geocities. The organization's maddening, but it's a potentially fascinating guide to extra-legally exploring the historic London underground beyond the currently-operating 287 stations. There's often interesting alternate histories for the Ghost Stations, which are eerie and intriguing in their own right. Certain platforms and tunnels were used as bunkers and secret records storage in WWII, chosen for their ability to outlast a more complete blitz which would have razed the upper city. Lurking along the lines, you can find 19th century relics of the fierce competition of the privatized-undergrounds era that predated the triumph of the modern, unified civic tube. The closed British Museum stop is supposedly haunted by the pissed off ghost of an appropriated Egyptian mummy, and the newspaper company that offered a hefty reward to anyone willing to spend the night on the all-too-readily closed platform never had to award that prize.

I'm thinking of doing a larger project, tentatively based on this sort of thing, the two or three existing, seemingly lackluster books on the tube's history and a Village Voice article from a few years ago on the character of the infrequently visited final stops of all the major New York lines.  I'll let you know if anything materializes.

Adult Travelcard -- For everyone that bitches about how the tube is soooooo expeeeensive, omg, doesn't this look relatively comparable to the MTA bulk unlimited passes?