serinde

Earlier in the year, I was let loose in a bookstore (you fools!) and picked up a copy of the World Central Kitchen Cookbook. Partially this is because I am a fan (and supporter) of the org and what they do, but also because I am getting extremely over trying to find recipes off the intarwubs, and I am turning once more to dead trees.

Things and stresses being as they are, I hadn't actually really plowed into it until several weeks back. The first recipe I made was the first recipe in the book, their Firefighter Chili, which is a Cincinnati chili[1] and not too far from my usual recipe. But it's very good and I recommend it to you. However, this weekend I went a bit further afield to the Chicken Chili Verde.

The recipe's pretty easy--
1. blitz scallions, cilantro, garlic, jalapeno, and whole fire-roasted green chiles [remember the chiles] in a blender to make a paste
2. saute onions and chunks of chicken breast in a pot
3. add the green stuff, as well as salt, pepper, cumin, coriander, and oregano
4. add tomatillos, chicken broth, and a can of chickpeas
5. Cook for a few hours and serve it forth over rice with lime juice, cotija, and maybe more scallions & cilantro if that's your kink.

The flavor profile is excellent; fresh, sharp, and has a slow heat to it that by the bottom of the bowl left me with a pleasing ring of fire around my mouth (giggity). But, there are two spots of trouble; the first is that simmering chicken breasts for two hours gives you something not unlike shoe leather; and the other is that it was wayyyyyy too watery. I think the cause is that the called-for fire roasted green chiles were a thing I could not find in any of the stores I tried; I had to sub in ~16 oz of chopped fresh green chiles, and ~4oz of chopped hot hatch chiles, both of which had a lot of liquid in them. So even after two hours of simmering, it's still very watery. It's worth doing again, though, and with more attention and a bit of tweaking[2]. For the remainder of this batch - it makes a lot - I may try straining it and seeing if that gets us anywhere.

[1] :touches earpiece: New information! I grew up with the understanding that a ground-beef red chili with beans is Cincinnati chili. Apparently that's not the case, and the true Cincy article has more Mediterranean (or indeed medieval) spice profile, and they put it on spaghetti?!? Weirdos.

[2] In addition to using chicken thighs instead of breasts, I think I would leave out the chickpeas. They make perfect sense if you're making a lot of food for people in a disaster situation, but in our mild and modest home life they aren't really adding much.

The day was mostly going to be a loss in multiple transit forms, but it was brightened a little bit by going out to early breakfast with two of S.'s friends from grammar school (!), who were also flying out that day (though much earlier than us). We went to the student caff a few blocks away and had a really nice visit before they headed to the airport, and we went back to our hotel to do the last minute faffing before making the long trek to Heathrow ourselves.

I must say, the new Elizabeth Line is a nice option for your Heathrow travel needs; more expensive, but faster & more comfortable, than taking the Picadilly Line, and cheaper & more flexible than the Heathrow Express.

Still, we had rather a lot of time to kill at the airport, so we hunkered down at the "Gordon Ramsay Plane Food" (ha ha ha), which was pricey but out of the madding crowd, and ate and drank rather too much while waiting to go to the gate. (Highly recommend their G&Ts.) The flight was pleasantly unremarkable and indeed early; Newark had its usual one border patrol station open, so that was a tiresome wait, but our bags were already on the belt when we got through and they didn't bother with Customs, so it all evened out. Beth was good enough to pick us up and give us a lift home, so we were home by 8:30 and attended to the cats (Bertie has been extremely vocal in his denunciation) and so to bed.

The only other planned meal of our trip was at St JOHN, a fabulous place which was ground zero for the nose-to-tail eating revival. I'd been there before a couple of times; S. had not, so this seemed like the moment. We could only ("only") get reservations at the Marylebone branch, rather than the mothership, but this was fine. We learned that this iteration is more in the direction of "get several dishes and share them", which was fine by us. Alas they did not have my absolute favorite dish, the bone marrow and parsley salad, but so it goes.

Started with a kir apéritif, then got the first round: a deep fried Welsh rarebit - you could think of it as a rarebit croquette and not be too far off - and fried crackly pig skin; I had a glass of their house white, and S. had a glass of Bourgogne (Domaine Bruno Colin 2022) that was notably excellent. The rarebit was delicious; the pig skin was good in its way, but a) really too rich for a starter and b) would have been better warm rather than room temperature.

Next we split crispy duck leg on a bed of sliced fennel bulb with roasted shallots, all tossed with a sharp vinaigrette. St JOHN is particularly skilful at dressings, which is important when you are dealing with mountains of rich ingredients. Followed was a slab of roast Middle White[1] pork with braised parsnips, accompanied by a salad of...I'm not sure what kind of lettuce, but it was crisp and good...with another brilliant dressing including pickled walnuts. The pork was melt-in-your mouth delicious and it could make you swear off something as crude as beef forever. We had way too much food, and I couldn't do justice to the parsnips or the salad as a result. With this, we had a bottle of Bandol (2022), of which my only wish was that they'd opened it earlier rather than when the duck came out.

I was also leaving room for dessert: we split an apple crumble, which was perfect, and had a glass of Sauternes apiece. Then we slowly rolled into a cab and returned to base.


[1] a British heritage pig breed

Both of us slept much better last night, so much so that we only woke up close to 8 (which, in theory, was our breakfast seating). We finally rolled in about twenty to nine, but no one seemed to care, so that was OK. I thought it imprudent to do another museum day, so after considering some possibilities, we opted to go to Kew Gardens[1], where I have never been, and where S. had spent a lot of happy time but not for several decades when he lived in the area.

You might say, a garden in November[2]? but any fool can make a spring or summer riot of flowers look good. If the skills are present, a fall garden can be beautiful and soul-stirring; and it should be to no one's surprise that Kew is full of these skills We didn't have time, or indeed the meat-sack capability, to see the whole thing - particularly I regret not making it to the far corner to the woodland walk - but I did at least get to visit their "Treetop Walkway", which is a circular path sixty feet (!) in the air. We had a warm-up at the cafe and I stimulated the gift shop economy, and then we took the bus into Richmond, which you might think of as Montclair but historical. (It is also the setting for Ted Lasso, for the Gentle Readers on that particular wagon.) We ambled through the high street, went down to the riverside, had a pint at a pub right on the Thames, and then back up to get dinner at a brasserie which was good enough, though overpriced (see? Montclair!). Back to the hotel about quarter past eight for a cup of herbal tea and a telly program on Brunelleschi's dome.

[1] I am deeply chagrined that there are several ways you can take a boat to Kew, none of which were available today.

[2] Had we been a week later, the gardens would have had their apparently extensive nighttime holiday stuff on; which staff were busy as beavers working to set up during our visit. That seems to be a theme for this trip.

Transfer day! We got up, had one last excellent breakfast, gathered our traps and headed to the train station (somewhat trammelled by crowds amassing for the local Remembrance Day parade). We obtained pies and beer for the journey - and tried to get some Wensleydale to bring back, but the local cheese shop only had it in wedges, not transportable wax-sealed rounds, alas - and met Beth on the platform. The train back was equally comfortable and swift, though we had some confusion around "why are some seats reserved when our booking didn't let us reserve them"; as well, there were a party of dowagers next to us who were rather whooping it up and drinking fizz at 11am. On the one hand, loud; on the other, I am pretty sure this is my future, so I steered my an annoyance into a Good For Them!.

At Kings Cross, we wimped out chose the path of prudence and got a cab to the hotel, which was about 15 minutes away in any form of transit, because London. The room is...not quite what it was painted on the website, but meets minimum viable, and the staff seem nice. I dropped my bags, turned around, and walked back to the British Library (right next to Kings Cross, yes) to meet Beth, where we did a double-header of their two exhibitions: "Life in Ancient Dunhuang" and "Medieval Women In Their Own Words". The former was small, the latter very large, and both were excellent. We had about half an hour at the end so went up to the regular gallery, which has stuff like the Magna Carta, Shakespeare's First through Fourth Folios, &c &c. At that point, the museum was closing and my feet were absolutely killing me, so we limped over to St Pancras for drinks at the refurbished Victorian booking office. The drinks were of course way expensive, but quite good; and our timing was excellent because it seems that, at 5:05pm every day, they mix up a big bowl of rum punch in the middle of the bar and serve it forth to all and sundry. So that was cool. (If you don't know why St Pancras / the Midland Grand Hotel is cool, go look it up. It's worth your time.)

However, the bar only serves (expensive) nibbles, and because it was Sunday, all the other restaurants in the refurbed part of the hotel closed early, so we wandered out to the lounge area that's in the hotel lobby, formerly the taxi pull-through between the hotel and the train station, and had perfectly acceptable (if again, overpriced) fish & chips. We took a brief walk through the old hotel to see the beautifully restored Grand Staircase - you may have seen it in the video for the Spice Girls' "Wannabe", or for most of my readership, in the Neverwhere episode "Down Street" - and then Beth headed out to her airport hotel before flying home, and we returned to base. It was only about 8 by then but we were knackered, so watched a bit of telly in bed (one episode of Alan Cummings riding the Flying Scotsman, and one episode of Wolf Hall) before lights-out.

Slept even worse, as at about 11pm my brain suddenly thought it was on New York time again and was wide awake. Sigh.

After breakfast - chilly, grey, misty day, so I had porridge with cinnamon apples and berries - I made my way over to the conference location, which was a Friends' [Quaker] Meeting house. I shan't go into details about the papers, but it was an enjoyable and educational day; I learned things, and it was good to be amongst a community of thought and practice. I also got a lot of knitting done (enough that I had to pull six rows out because I'd gone past the point where I should've started the thumb gusset).

The conference ended at 5, whereupon Beth and I ambled back through town, stopping at the not-quite-set-up-yet Christmas market that nevertheless had a hot drinks stand open. We sat in the square and people-watched with a cup of mulled wine, then met S. for dinner at a French(ish) restaurant near the hotel - we would have cheerfully returned to Forest but they had no availability, alas. Still, we made a good meal and merriment. S. went back to the room, as his knee was pretty well done in from his day's activities, and Beth and I went for a walk. We couldn't actually walk on the walls, as they close them at dusk it seems, but we walked an arc around up to Monk Bar and then back south. We dropped back in at the Trembling Madness and schmoozed our way into some seats, and had a good hour or so with our interesting beers and interesting seat-mates (three successive groups); and so to bed.

Preface: This vacation plan grew out of "go with Beth on a flying weekend to the MEDATS conference", which is in York this year. I loved York when S. and I spent a couple days there about eight years ago, so why not do that again and also learn about medieval textiles? However, since it was so close to our anniversary, it morphed into "S. and I go to York for that flying weekend and then spend the following week in London".

We took a red-eye Wednesday night - frankly, going crazy about last-minute packing interleaved with a work day was a welcome distraction from contemplating the fucking hellscape which our country has opted for - which was redder than anticipated, as our scheduled 9:35pm departure turned into a 1am departure, ugh. Neither of us slept super well on the plane, either (among other things, the power at S's seat went out, so he couldn't use his CPAP). On the bright side, they kindly cancelled the planned Underground strike, so we were able to just roll onto the Picadilly line to Kings Cross.

Because of the extreme delays, we missed the off-peak fares to York and had to pay full whack for our tickets, for a sum that made me stretch my eyes; but the train was a) on time, b) comfortable, and c) fast. We got to York about 5pm, walked the ~15 minutes to the hotel (N.B.: rolling bags on olde tyme cobbled streets are a bit troublesome), and flopped. We had pre-booked dinner at Forest, the restaurant in the hotel, as it had a good reputation without being fancy, and had an excellent meal.

( Food Porn )

After dinner, we came upstairs and fell over.

I am finally testing negative; my nose is mostly clear and I'm only coughing rarely. Ironically, I'm feeling more dragged-out than at any prior point in this entire bout...enough that I actually fell asleep this afternoon, a thing generally unheard of.

I am not looking forward to next week's work endeavors.

Came outside for a bit as the sun was going down, and the humidity came to join. But I'm having a mild beer and watching the fireflies start up. (And hearing the neighborhood pyromaniacs start up, which is less agreeable, but at least it's far less of a war zone than Inwood was.)


Status ditto, or perhaps a slight improvement in that I haven't taken decongestant since the morning and I'm not wholly incapacitated. I am pretty fuzzy-brained, meds or no meds, but I can't tell if that's extra beyond "sick plus disrupted routine".

Status, ditto. Or nearly; I'm definitely coughing less, and I should note my sinus weasels have moved from yellow to clear, so that's something.

I had to run an errand at midday because S. couldn't be away from a toilet long enough - fresh N-95, bathed hands in sanitizer, moved as quickly as I could - and I was absolutely wrecked after it. So although the negative levels aren't as apparent as the last time, clearly they exist.

Beth came over for dinner and visit al fresco, as she's just had a bout herself and she felt her risk of reinfection was minimal. I really needed that.