Four months

 Well, that was an unplanned hiatus. Here’s a quick recap of key events since my last post:

The month of June was dominated by a two-week trip to England which was a combination of work and holiday. We were mostly in London, with excursions out of town on the weekends. The highlight of these was a trip to Oxford, our former hometown and Miss B’s birthplace, where we caught up with various friends and revisited old haunts. These included my favorite place, the Covered Market, here still sporting some yarnbombing to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee, which had happened in May.

Speaking of Miss B, the theme of July was some big life stuff happening for her. One thing involved her being away for most of the month, on a three-week pre-college course that enabled her to delve into her love of history and start getting a taste of university life in an extremely historic location (as well as help her parents start preparing mentally and logistically for the next phase).

She finished up right at the end of the month, just before a milestone birthday. Luckily not yet too old for a themed cake though!

We kicked off August with our final major event of the summer, our annual jaunt to the coast. This is our fourth year at Cape May, and we love it as much as ever - plenty of sun, lazing by the ocean, and New Jersey farmstand produce. 

My cooking highlight this year, to make the most of some great local tomatoes, was a MacGyvered focaccia. I made the same basic bread recipe that I always make, then after letting it rise I gave it the focaccia treatment - i.e., spreading it in a baking pan with lots of olive oil, poking dimples in it with my fingers, sprinkling salt on it, and then baking it. It was yummy, and since then I’ve continued to work it into the regular bread rotation. 

This rotation has gotten more regular as August shifted into September, because along with other transitions, I’ve made some changes to my work commitments which I’m hopeful will allow for better balancing of priorities across multiple areas of life. 

I posted a picture of the pillow on the left on Instagram a few weeks ago, describing it as “turning anxiety management (handstitching) into home decor”. Ideally (among other things) I’d like more of the handwork and less of the anxiety.

I'm not quite at this point, but it's something to aspire to. More to come soon, I hope, and that your anxiety is minimal and your contentment maximal in the meantime.

Oxford, again

 I spent the first week of February in Oxford for work meetings – two days with my newly-formed department of four, then another two with the larger team of central staff. There were about 40 of us there altogether. We did team-building stuff – Meyers-Briggs personality exercises, show and tell, a bowling excursion – and presentations about what each of our departments does. We had intensive discussions about how we’re going to implement our organization’s newly approved and very ambitious strategic plan. We had software training sessions and meetings that took advantage of the fact that people who normally work scattered across four different countries were briefly in the same building. We reveled in the weirdness of walking in early to get emails done, and finding an office full of people that we mostly see only on skype calls, and how simultaneously normal and surreal that felt.

Simultaneously normal and surreal is a good description of my whole week in Oxford. Because I lived there for so long, it still feels like home: I spent my first afternoon doing a list of errands in the city centre, visiting shops I used to be in and out of at least once a week. While I was making the rounds, I ran into local friends who were doing the same, accompanied by their grandson who I knew about but hadn’t yet met. We had an impromptu chat and then went our separate ways, so I could finish up in time to meet another group of friends for dinner – most of whom I had seen when I was here last year, but one of whom I hadn’t since I moved away six years ago. All very lovely and normal – but yet surreal, because I live halfway around the world now, and Miss B and DP were not waiting at home in our tiny old house in west Oxford, but going about their business in shorts and flip-flops in Canberra while I unpacked flannel pajamas and woolly socks at bedtime. It’s so easy to slot back in that it makes me forget time is always passing.

And on it went: my hostess, J., one of the founding members of my organization, but recently retired and on to other things; still up on all the gossip, but her primary interests are no longer the everyday dramas of our formerly shared work and colleagues. My new department – two of us who’ve worked together for years and two who’ve been in the organization less than six months – meeting in person for the first time on Monday, and separation on Friday feeling like a wrench. Our central team: longtime colleagues and recent additions; established relationships and emerging dynamics; new information and ancient history. And bookending the week, the plane trip that takes you from summer to winter, dry to wet, sunlight to darkness, and then back; between two places that are painfully full of familiar things and memories, and seem all at once close enough to touch and on different planets. And strangest of all is that it’s so easy – and yet such a massive task – to travel between the two, while life goes on in both places, regardless of where you might be.

So perhaps it’s fitting that my latest favorite restaurant in Oxford - which I’ve been to multiple times on my last two visits, and which furnished the most memorable dinner of the week - wasn’t even open when I last lived there.

More beautiful food photography courtesy of MJ

English cuisine

No, this is not an oxymoron, I swear. Really, it’s not.

During the near-decade that we lived in Oxford, one of the questions I was most commonly asked about England by non-English people was, “How’s the food?” Usually accompanied by an anticipatory grimace, prompted by all the stories they’d heard about awful English food, or by memories of crummy meals they’d eaten themselves in tourist-trap London pubs.

My standard answer was not what they expected. I usually responded, “Expensive.”

Oxford is by far the most expensive place I have ever lived, and we spent our whole time there living on essentially one income. (First DP was a student and I worked full-time; then he worked full-time and I worked part-time and looked after Miss B.) Even grocery shopping was pricey, and eating out was an occasional luxury, usually involving a cheap-and-cheerful curry at our favorite Indian or burgers at one of the local pubs.

But once in a blue moon, we’d get the chance for a really nice meal out – visiting parents, work dos, or a splurge we’d saved up for. It was at one of these that I first discovered sticky toffee pudding. From then on, I sought it out whenever I went to a restaurant serving classic English food. It is far and away my favorite example of true English sweet cookery – a sucker-punch of moist, rich, toffee-soaked deliciousness. It's the perfect end to a Sunday lunch on a cold winter day.

Sticky toffee pudding
Adapted from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey
My main adaptation of this recipe was to halve it, and even this makes for 6 serious servings. The original recipe suggests baking the cake in a muffin tin for ease of serving later; I use my dessert shell pan, which cooks the batter into 6 cakes, each with a bowl-shaped indentation in the top, the better to fill with toffee sauce and ice cream.

Cake

1 cup/6 oz/180 g chopped dates

.75 cup/6 oz/180 ml water

.75 tsp/4 g baking soda/bicarbonate of soda (divided)

1 cup/4 oz/120 g all-purpose/plain flour

pinch salt

.5 tsp/3 g baking powder

.75 stick/3 oz/90 g butter, at room temperature

.75 cup/6 oz/180 g firmly packed light brown sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp/5 ml vanilla

Toffee sauce
1 stick/4 oz/120 g butter

1.5 cup/12 oz/360 g firmly packed dark brown sugar

1 cup/8 oz/240 ml heavy cream

.5 tsp/3 ml vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C and grease baking pan.

Cake Combine dates and water in a small saucepan over medium-low heat and bring just to a boil. Let simmer, uncovered, until all the water is absorbed, 10-15 minutes, and the dates have softened. Remove pan from heat, stir in .5 tsp of the baking soda, set aside for about 15-20 minutes while you get on with the rest of the process.

Sift together flour, salt, remaining baking soda, and baking powder, and set aside. In a medium-large mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then add the eggs one at a time, followed by the vanilla. Fold the dates into the batter, followed by the dry ingredients, until just combined.

Divide the cake mixture evenly among the 6 cups, then place pan in the oven. Bake until a tester comes out clean, 15-25 minutes.

Toffee sauce Combine butter and sugar in a medium-large saucepan over medium-low heat, and let them melt together, 5-10 minutes. Add the cream, vanilla, and salt, and bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook until the sauce thickens, stirring often, for another 5-10 minutes.

Assembly Spoon 1 large tablespoon of warm sauce into each serving bowl, then place cake bowl on top. Drizzle another 2 tablespoons into each cake bowl and over the sides. Top with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and serve warm.

Serves 6 generous portions.

In transit

Good morning from the domestic terminal of Kingsford-Smith Airport in Sydney! I'm on my way home from Oxford to Canberra, and have been traveling for (I think) 28+ hours. I've got one more very short flight to go. I had hoped to have a photo to accompany this post, of the amazing breakfast I just had (sourdough toast topped with goat's cheese, tomato, and avocado), but my camera didn't actually record the one photo I took before digging in. So you'll just have to imagine its looks, as well as its taste.

It will probably be my last restaurant meal for a few days - I'm definitely ready to eat some home-cooked food. Other than one meal that C. and I cooked at our friend J.'s house last Monday night for a group of six, it's been restaurant or conference food all the way. Luckily, being in Oxford meant that I got to revisit several of my favorite restaurants and pubs, as well as discover some new ones.

We didn't just go to Oxford to eat and drink (although we managed to do plenty of both), but to attend work meetings and spend face-to-face time with colleagues we mostly work with via email or teleconference. It was a jam-packed, full-on seven days - one of my colleagues once described our .org's meetings as 'getting plugged into the Matrix.' That encapsulates it perfectly for me, who spends most of my working life alone. Energizing, mind-blowing, all-encompassing....On Friday night, I boarded the plane to Singapore, fell asleep while we were still sitting at the gate, and slept for almost the entire 13-hour flight. That pretty much sums up the effect the week had on me.

And now it's back to the daily round in Canberra. I wonder what DP and Miss B will request for dinner? And what the state of the larder is likely to be?

UK recap

I’m back in the US, jet lagged and still recovering from four solid days of meetings and thinking and face-to-face social interaction. I’m glad to be back, but I had a great trip—and was reminded in about equal measure of the things I miss, and don’t miss, about living in the UK.