Queen's Garden Party: Tastes

People seem to be most curious about the menu. Not to disappoint anyone, but I actually didn't consume any of the tea -- it seemed too hot for Twinings, even with lots of milk in it. So I opted for iced coffee -- which was just the right side of sweet -- and lemon barley water. (Someone asked me how the champagne was, but no alcohol was served.)

I sampled one of each sandwich; don't worry, they were almost literally the size of a finger, with no crusts. I hadn't had a crustless lunch since that phase I went through at age 7. Cucumber and mint was nice but not enough mint for my taste. Gammon ham with mustard was the best, and then there was egg mayonnaise and cress. I think it's a law that all teas must serve egg mayonnaise and cress sandwiches. They are certainly in every sandwich shop in town, and while I enjoyed eating that one, it certainly wasn't a unique selection. But you're not really going for unique I suppose -- you're going for tradition!

And last but not least, the cakes: a rich chocolate and toffee with the crown on top (in chocolate, natch); a strawberry custard concoction; a similar one with raspberries; a type of cheescake; and an almond pastry filled with cream. I didn't sample all of these, just the first two and the last one. Finally, smiling servants walked through the throng with silver trays of Loseley ice cream. The choices were strawberries and cream or Madagascar vanilla. The vanilla was great -- the perfect way to end the day.

Magic Burrito Bus

We've written at great length about our jones for burritos. We've journeyed far and wide tasting what London has to offer in this area, from the disappointing (the stand off of Goodge Street that had laughably mild jalapenjos), the tiny (that place over by Tottenham Court Road) and the pricey (£12 at the Texas Embassy). But we've finally been rescued.

Among the many fine amenities of our new flat is its proximity to Whitecross Street, which hosts an outdoor market on weekdays ....


... which you can see above (the steeple in the distance is St. Luke's, the former church from which our neighborhood takes its name). One of the vendors is the burrito bus in the top photo, which serves as fine a burrito as you'll find in most of the United States. I order the hot, which I am able to tolerate even with my not-so-hardy palate, so those with mouths of asbestos might consider asking them to make it especially spicy (British cuisine tending away from the super-spicy). We've been here now 10 days and I believe I've been there three times already. If it's wrong to eat a burrito every three days, I don't want to be right.

And maybe later I'll tell you about the Russian barbers on Whitecross Street who singed my ear hair off to make them smooth as babies' ... um, ears.

At Least One Thing A Pigeon Won't Eat

Wasabi.




And they'll leave you alone too.

Random Monday Thoughts

I drank a Budweiser over the weekend. I'm not proud of this. But the pub where I was chatting with friends had lost most of its power (but not all, oddly), so they couldn't serve food and the taps weren't working. Maybe they were just trying to get rid of us. If so, it worked: We decamped shortly thereafter to another pub that had working taps and stoves.

The Metcheck weather web site refers to our weekend storm as "Storm Isaac." Did we start naming extratropical storms? Or is this an English usage with which I am unfamiliar?

Happy Thanksgiving

It is, of course, not a holiday here, although it has many roots here, as we all learned in elementary school and as Mrs. W, our friends and I were reminded when we visited Plymouth in Devon back in August. It's not a holiday here, so Mrs. W doesn't get the day off, but I'm not working, for money, anyway, because I work almost exclusively for Americans. (We get the Commie holiday, May Day, however). I am working, uncompensated, because I'm thinking about our menu for a Thanksgiving feast we're putting on for a mixture of English and American guests on Sunday. Thanks to the avian influenza outbreak in Suffolk, our butcher's turkey supplier cannot deliver, but we're promised ducks. So be it. We don't know what the Pilgrims ate, anyway.

I get the sense that there's some fascination with this holiday here, the idea that you take a day to give thanks to the deity of your choice (or fate) for what you have. I don't have a sense that there's any desire to add it to the rather meager holiday schedule here (OK, OK, there's the minimum four weeks of vacation), but I think people like the quaintness of the idea.

Here's A Tip: Don't Buy Etrade

This morning, BBC Breakfast (think Good Morning America or Today) had a feature on tipping service workers. Their in-studio guest was a "manners and etiquette expert" whose first statement was, "Well if you go to a place like America, they really do go over the top on tipping ...."

How About A Weather Post?

Well, this green island has moved its clocks back to Greenwich Mean Time, leaves are leaping from branches, and the ground is taking on the permaslop texture (the tundra has permafrost, but Britain has permaslop), so autumn must have caught us. While I'm a big fan of the secret summer of September, I have to admit this time of year is hardest of all--not for the cold, but for the lack of light. Losing approximately an hour of daylight at the winter solstice compared to Washington, D.C., was even harder than I expected last year. We're about six weeks away from our earliest sunsets (3:50 p.m. from Dec. 12 through Dec. 15), so maybe I should consider getting used to it. At least I can look forward to mince pies, a dish which I believe has its roots in the ingredients a royal chef put by mistake in a pie because his kitchen was too dark in December.

It's Smiling At Me, The Answer

Congratulations to Oldest Kid, the resident foodie of AA's readers, for getting two out of three, sort of (something tells me OK had help). The hair was oxen meat (and an ox is just a bull with an education), the face was truffle oil, and the head was whipped cauliflower.

The Food Of Your Choice

While I ready some photo posts from Barcelona (Mrs. W's camera went to work with her yesterday in her purse), I've left another clue about the unidentified food product downstairs. In the meantime, I, along with Sean Cullen, would like to remind you that the Food Of Your Choice Could End Your Life Tonight:

It's Smiling At Me!

What food is this? Take a guess: Hair, head, and face.

Hola From Barcelona

If you thought no chef would ever be able to combine sea bass with peach ice cream in a single dish that anybody would eat, you'd be wrong.

More Things That Are Better Back Home

Peanut butter.

Some of you may know (or have been enlisted into this effort) that we ask our American visitors to bring us peanut butter. The British peanut butter tastes funny. I don't know if it's the sugar content or the oils, but it just don't taste right! The American brand that we've seen here, Skippy, comes in these laughably small jars. Peanut butter is a staple, folks! It is not a condiment!

As a postscript: I've complained of the tiny little jars on an online forum of mostly Brits. One response: "No, our jars are the correct size. American jars are too big."

Tea Prejudice

We had a handyman in over the weekend, a bloke who spoke cockney but lives in Kent. I offered him some tea, and he asked what I had. "Earl Gray," I replied.

"Nah, that's what the Queen drinks," he said.

He had coffee. White.

Britain Turning Yellow

And no, I don't mean to suggest that Britain's impending withdrawal from Iraq makes them "yellow." It's this story for the agriculturally minded:

On the second leg of my south-north train journey, another 400 miles or thereabouts from London to Edinburgh, once again there was no missing the proliferation of Day-Glo yellow plantations. Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Northumbria and the Scottish borders whizzed by, revealing vast swathes of land, all carpeted by bobbing yellow flowerheads of rape.

In the 1970s, oilseed rape was barely known in Britain. Many people were suspicious of this alien seed which announces itself with its all-pervasive perfume, reminiscent of honey to some, cloyingly sweet and as sickly as regurgitated baby milk to others. Now it is our third largest arable crop. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says that in the past year alone production has gone up by an impressive 17%. Next year, it is tipped to top 2m tonnes. In terms of acreage, oilseed rape now accounts for 11% of the crops cultivated in the UK.

The economics of rapeseed cultivation have never looked more attractive to farmers because there is no problem finding a buyer. These days it is not just the old markets - cheap cooking oil, margarine, cattle feed, candles, soaps, plastics, polymers and lubricants. Oilseed rape has hit the big time as a biofuel. Currently, most of the UK's production is snapped up by Germany for bio-diesel.

And the latest silky-smooth ambassador for the crop is "extra virgin rapeseed oil", currently being touted as Britain's answer to extra virgin olive oil. For a relatively modest expenditure (compared with the serious investment needed to go into biofuels), growers from Suffolk up to Yorkshire and the Scottish Borders are installing screw presses on their farms and cold-pressing the seed. Northumbrian cereal grower Colin McGregor, who produces golden extra virgin rapeseed oil under the Olifeira brand, sells it at £6 for a 500ml bottle - the same sort of price tag you might expect on a classy bottle of Tuscan extra virgin olive oil. "That retail price is adding around 2,000% to the commodity value of my crop," he says. By any measure, an eye-popping profit hike.

I'd been wondering what those yellow flowers were.

Sounds good for the farmer, right? But wait:

It took the highest level of plant breeding after the second world war to make what was a toxic substance fit for human consumption. Greedy for nutrients and notoriously dependent on nitrogen-rich fertilisers, oilseed rape is among the worst arable crops for leaching nitrates into waterways and polluting aquifers. It is one of the crops that led to the setting up of nitrate sensitive areas and nitrate vulnerable zones across the EU.

Oilseed rape is also plagued by a long list of pests and diseases - everything from cabbage stem flea beetle and peach potato aphid to black leg fungus and white stem rot - all of which require chemicals to keep them under control. A 2004 report from the Office of National Statistics states that oilseed rape crops receive on average three herbicides, two fungicides and two insecticides during the course of a growing season.

As a consequence of the intensive way in which they are grown on vast swathes of land, oilseed rape varieties are developing resistance to many of the pesticides routinely used. "For all these reasons, it is almost never grown or recommended as a crop on organic farms. It is a classic example of a crop designed for intensive agriculture," says Richard Sanders, policy and communications director at Elm Farm Research Centre, which develops and supports sustainable land use.

Let's see: Once toxic, now I'm supposed to use it in my cooking; very bad for the environment ....

Cricket Madness

Last night we went to the Christmas party for Smitty's running club last night. (They still call them Christmas parties here, because they actually have a state religion, and it's Christianity.) It was at a place called Tupelo Honey, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Southern cuisine. But anyway...

We were chatting with a nice Australian couple about the Ashes, and they informed us that while Australia had won the tournament, winning the first three of five tests, they were still going to play the next two tests. This would be like having the Cubs win the World Series in game 5*, but playing games 6 and 7 anyway, to kind of rub it in. "But wouldn't you rather be on the beach with your trophy?" I asked. Clearly we were not going to come to an understanding, especially not after that bottle of Rioja.

Then an Englishman piped up: "But it's not the World Series. Cricket is nothing like baseball!" I said, "Yeah, cuz baseball MAKES SENSE." I may not get invited back to the party next year. Oh well!

* This would never happen, but it's fun to tease the Cubs fans, isn't it?

Arrrrr! It's a pasty!

(No, not that kind of pasty, you pervs. It's a pie with meat and potatoes inside.)

Some things I won't miss about America, Part 2

But only because they're here in spades:

1. Starbucks (I pass three of them on my 18-minute walk to work each morning.)

2. The Simpsons (Twice as many episodes on week nights on Sky TV than on Fox at home.)

3. Unreliable public transit. Red Line, you got nothin' on the Northern Line

Some sightseeing

Despite arising at noon or so (which, techinically, is 7 a.m. EST, so I've evidently made no progress), we were able to walk about today.

Our street:






Old Spitalfield Market (10 quid to anybody who can identify Mrs. Werbenmanjensen):



A new coffee brand (he's so frothy):


My new tie (from Old Spitalfield Market--dig the leather saddle and the English-style saddle bag):



Mrs. Werbanmanjensen's new purchase (it's made from palm seeds):

Would you like brown sauce with that?

A quick introduction to UK cuisine:

Virgin Atlantic upper class asks you to place a breakfast order before you go to sleep. I wasn't particularly interested in cereal, so I selected something like a salmon fritatta. Awoken from my half-sleep in the middle of the night, I was informed by my cabin attendant that it was no longer on the menu, and would I like a bacon roll? After groggily trying to wrap my mind around the message given to me in an accent with which I am unfamiliar, I agreed to a "bacon roll," whatever that was. The next question: Would you like brown sauce with that? Or red sauce? Well, red suggests tomato, and brown suggests ... um, I don't want to think about it. I selected red sauce. It was ketchup.