Back in Dartmouth Park!

I've been back in London for about ten days now, but it was only yesterday that I returned to Dartmouth Park for a drink with friends at the Lord Palmerston, or as Becca and I came to call it, the Tap (Lord Palmerston -> LP -> lumbar puncture -> spinal tap -> tap).  That climb up Dartmoouth Park Hill from Tufnell Park felt awfully familiar.

English Pubs

Just something I was thinking about today...here is a list of things that can happen in English pubs that would rarely or never happen in an American bar:

1. A discussion with the bartender about spotted dick. (2 months ago)

2. An 8-year-old boy explaining the rules of rugby to you. (6 weeks ago)

3. A 3-hour long session of Settlers of Catan. (3 weeks ago)

4. A dog sits next to you and demands to be rubbed behind the ears for 10 minutes. (this afternoon)



But here's something you can see in pubs in both the US and the UK: grown men crying at football.

Remember us?

Well hey there, strangers! It's been a whole month since our last blog post, so I figured, if not now, when?

I'm sure you've all been very busy since our last post and haven't really been worried about our absence from the blogosphere, but I'll give you a quick update on what we've been doing anyway. But first, let me present to you, what might the MOST random photo of the day:

This was posted on our very own street in London. In the countryside people worry about foxes snatching their hens, but I guess in big, bad Dartmouth Park there are other foes about.


Okay, on to a brief wrap-up of what we've been doing lately. Last time I wrote Danny and I were living a liminal existence: preparing for our final months in London, but not yet sure where our destination in the US was. Well no longer, because on March 17th I matched to Cambridge Health Alliance (yay!), and just 3 short (but long-feeling!) weeks later we landed our dream apartment in Somerville, just 0.4 miles from the hospital and 0.15 miles to the best ice cream ever. And near many good friends! All of this is very exciting, but it's been keeping us away from the blog!

But perhaps more importantly, in the past 4 weeks we've been doing a lot of this:
Enjoying the surprisingly warm and sunny weather that London has delivered, and spending time drinking outside with friends. We've had 3 excellent visits from friends from the US, had some good times with friends here (first ever English garden party!) and we've been preparing for Danny's family to visit at the end of the month. And of course, we've been watching some cricket.


This weekend we took advantage of a particularly nice day to walk around Golders Green (NW 11), which is currently the main Jewish neighborhood of London. I had my doubts as to whether it would deliver, but for a few blocks it really did feel like we were transported to Brookline, or even Brooklyn. Within a 0.5 mile radius there were over a dozen bakeries, several kosher butchers, 3 Judaica shops, a Hebrew bookstore, a Polish bookstore, 3 large kosher grocery stores, and groups of young boys in kipot and girls in long skirts (and women in wigs, but we won't get into that). Many delis, not so many pubs. The air smelled like a mix of rugelach and white-fish salad, in a good way.

We went with 2 main goals in mind: buy some Matzah and other K for P food, and get bagels. And I'm happy to report that we succeeded on both counts! None of the bagels were as good as Kupels, but they were much better than the doughy ones we got at the way over-hyped Brick Lane Beigel Bake. The places we tried were Daniel's (of course!) and Carmelli's. One thing we didn't see much of was flavored cream cheese, which was disappointing to me, but overall it was a very lovely way to spend an afternoon!

Here are some photos for you to enjoy!

More treats from Belgium

These were treats we brought home with us:



Belgian chocolate: worth the hype.

Also, we discovered the secret of Belgian waffles! When you purchase a waffle from a little waffle stand, they're made in advance. At first this seems disappointing - wouldn't a fresh waffle be better? But it turns out that the key is in the reheating. After the magic Belgian waffle makers make these treats, they sprinkle sugar on them, then let them sit. Then when you stumble up to the counter in a gueze-induced haze and order one, they put the waffle back on the iron to warm up. In re-heating, the sugar sprinkled on top starts to melt. You can tell this is what happens because when they remove said waffle from the iron, a thin wisp of candy sugar trails behind it, and waffle is encrusted in sweetness. To quote the old Italian woman who was in line in front of us, "Oh, che buono!"

iiiiiiit's Pancake Day!

Well, okay, yesterday was Pancake day, but I couldn't write this post yesterday because we were watching the incredibly frustrating Arsenal vs. Barcelona game. But I couldn't help blogging about Pancake day, because it leads neatly into a larger discussion of silly British holidays that have food associated with them. Now, while I think it makes perfect sense to have particular foods for particular holidays (almost time to make Hamantashen!), these British ones seem funny to Yankees like us for the same reason that most British things are funny to us: they have funny names. After I decided to write this post I realized that there are actually only 3 holidays I can think of that fit into this category, but I'll try to make my discussion of each holiday as witty and amusing as possible in order to make it worth your time.


St. David's Day: Somehow we missed this one, which was March 1st this year. St. David's day celebrates, unsurprisingly, St. David, who is the patron saint of Wales. So needless to say this day gets much more attention in Wales, but it's worth mentioning here because 1) one of the traditions of this day is to wear either a daffodil or a leek pinned to your lapel, so it fits into my category of having a random food affiliated with it, and 2) I have a funny story about St. David's day. The original story with the leeks, Wikipedia tells me, is that during one of the many times when they were fighting the English, the Welsh decided to wear leeks on their uniforms to tell the difference between the two troops.

But my story about learning about St. David's day is funnier. 5 years ago Danny and I did trivia with some friends on what apparently was St. David's day. Of course, our friend Chris knew this, and he brought leeks for everyone to wear, either tucked into your ponytail or behind your ear or wherever. We won a very difficult trivia that night (anyone know where the Gulf of Taranto is? Mike did.), under the name, wait for it. "The Leeky Cauldron". I've never seen Chris more pleased with himself when he came up with this name, except for maybe when he picked 4 gelato flavors that complemented each other perfectly.


Shrove Tuesday:...okay, I actually didn't realized until just now that is actually what the rest of the world calls Mardi Gras. But it's an honest mistake, right? I mean, come on, Shrove Tuesday? what's that supposed to mean?. But that's almost a moot point, because at this point it just goes by its more informal name, Pancake Day. Again, wikipedia to the rescue: supposedly the pancakes came into popularity so people could use up sugar, eggs, butter, and other yummies before Lent started. Now, unsurprisingly, many more people make pancakes than give something up for Lent (although I'm always surprised by the number of people who actually give things us for Lent. Though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, since I never go to Synagogue but always keep Passover). I should point out that what the English mean when they talk about pancakes is actually crepes. We don't have our crepe pan with us, so Danny and I made old fashioned American pancakes, nice and fluffy, with a little whole wheat flour and oatmeal, cooked on a hot buttered pan, and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Dee-licious!


Guy Fawkes Night: this one has also picked up a more colloquial name: bonfire night. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic conspirator who was trying to assassinate King James 1 in 1605 by blowing up Parliament with a load of gunpowder. The holiday started as a celebration that the plot failed and the King survived (the King James Bible wasn't going to write itself, after all), plus a chance to burn an effigy of a Catholic terrorist. Now it's mostly celebrated by large bonfires and people setting off fireworks in their backyards, and by calling it bonfire night they can play down the sectarian origins of the story. But the desire to keep the peace doesn't prevent some people from continuing to burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes each year. To each his own. The food connection is that jacket potatoes (baked potatoes) have become the tradition food of bonfire night, because you can easily cook a potato by wrapping it in foil and throwing it in a fire. But I think these days people just throw them in the microwave instead.


Huh, I think that post ended up being kind of boring. Sorry. Really, it was all just an excuse to say, "We had pancakes for dinner last night, and it was awesome!"

Beers of Belgium

This is far from comprehensive, of course.  You’d need months of dedicated, er, work, to get through the breweries of Belgium.  Instead, here are images of some of the beers we had on our trip to Belgium.  Belgians take their glassware seriously, which means less need for captioning.

 

Gueuze at the Cantillon brewery.  Gueuze is a combination of variously aged lambics, which are naturally fermented and uncarbonated.

Kriek, more or less the cherry version of gueuze.  Take lambic and soak cherries in it for a while.  This is a far cry from the Lindeman’s fruit lambics you sometimes see in the US, which the Cantillon brewery pooh-poohs as cheating (they add sugar to help along the fermentation and sweeten the final product).  ‘Pleasantly sour’ is the way I’d describe this.

Nearly spring…

Signs of the times:

• The crocuses are peaking out of the ground in all sorts of glorious colors. (I’m relying on Becca here that these are, in fact, crocuses.  I’m hopeless with flowers beyond roses and tulips.)
• The sun now rises before 7:00 in the morning.
• More importantly, the sun was visible all day the past two days.
• Most importantly, the neighborhood children have begun chalking up the sidewalk.

(Sorry about the lack of blogging recently.  Aside from an awesome visit from friends from Boston, we’ve just been going about our normal lives without anything terribly remarkable happening.  But don’t worry – we’re off to Belgium this weekend and should return with plenty of material to write about.  The last time I was in Belgium I had three waffles, three beers, and three servings of chocolate in about five hours.  The mythical triple Belgian trifecta.  I hope to replicate it this weekend, albeit over a longer period of time.)