I did something really good yesterday. I cleared most of my email inbox!
From 1,327 emails down to 93 – with all emails properly filed, saved and, when appropriate, deleted! I feel absolutely cleansed!
The Wall
I have hit the proverbial writing wall.
I’ve got so many things I want to write about, I’ve take so many pictures that I want to post and I’ve started writing the blog entries, but I can’t seem to finish anything! In my head I know exactly what I want to write about, I know exactly what elements are part of the entry but as I sit in front of my PC and look at that blinking cursor, I freeze. The words just won’t come!
I think the writing muses have gone away somewhere. I’m thinking they’ve gone to somewhere warm and sunny. I feel a bit put out that they didn’t invite me on their spring break! I really wish they would come back. I really want to start writing again.
Little minds v big thinking
Pictures that make you think and go hmmmmm!
Looking for the blue door
My feet were killing me (I’d been wearing only heels for months and on this London trip I only brought flats–let me tell you, that was not intentional! My feet and leg muscles were telling me, in no uncertain terms, exactly how they felt about wearing flats after a heels-only arrangement for months! They hated the idea and me at that particular moment in time). They were absolutely murdering me. But I walked on–completely ignoring Portobello Road (which was an experience in itself – especially when the market is on!).
I walked on because I wanted to go to a Filipino food place. But as the experience was definitely forgettable, I won’t talk about it again.
My disappointment was all but forgotten when I left the Filipino food place because a few doors down was a familiar looking bookshop. People were posing in front of the shop, having their pictures taken and I couldn’t understand why. And then it dawned on me: I was in Notting Hill and they were posing near a BOOKSHOP! I ran (hobbled really quickly, more like!) the 100 meters to the bookshop and gasped (yes, out loud!) because it was THE bookshop. It was THE bookshop where the scenes for the Travel Book Company were shot for the movie Notting Hill (which rangs high up in my list of favourite movies, near enough to Sliding Doors for it to matter a lot!). I tried to be cool. I tried to be nonchalant and I managed to convince myself that I only wanted a photograph of the shop front, that that was enough. So snap away I did! Only just one photo! Ha!
So I walked away, and round the corner, I found the Notting Hill shop of the Biscuiteers. I had a look around the shop and oohed and aahed at the lovely iced biscuits. But I really wanted to ask the shop keeper if he knew where the house with the blue door was. I figured if they were local, they’d know where William Thacker’s house with the blue door was. I was told to go back to the Notting Hill Bookshop because the lady who ran the shop would definitely know. So my crown iced biscuite securely stored in my purse, I went then went back to the Notting Hill Bookshop to ask directions.
I went around to the bookshop because it was a bookshop and I LOVED bookshops. There’s something about the smell of bound paper that comforts me. Plus I didn’t really want to pounce on the lovely shop lady and just get the information and run out of the shop! It didn’t seem right. They had a copy of the Travel Book Shop Company’s sign up in the area where Rufus the thief stuffed a book down his trousers–or at least that’s where I thought it was shot. Apparently the interior layout of the shop hasn’t changed, it remains exactly same as it was in the movie! I couldn’t help myself and did a happy little dance because I was — sort of! — sharing a space with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts!
I bought a cloth book bag and a fridge magnet (to add to my growing collection) because I felt that I owed it to the lovely lady who ran the shop. As I waited at the till for her to ring up my purchases, I asked if she knew where the house with the blue door was. I also apologised in the same breath as I know she gets asked the same question time and time again. She laughed and gave the directions. I was relieved to hear that it was only a block away because as excited as I was to be in the Travel Bookshop, my feet were still hurting!
After a few pained steps, there it was, the house with a blue door! And for a while, I stared at the house, trying to decide why it looked a little different (I realised later that the pillars and the area framing the door were painted blue before and now they were white, except for the door). But it didn’t matter so much that it looked only slightly different.
For one brief shining moment, I was a girl, standing in front of the door, living a dream!
Just saying
I logged on knowing that I hadn’t written anything on the blog for a considerable amount of time. I didn’t really realise that the last blog entry I’d written was the day before Easter. My how time flies, even when one isn’t having fun. I’ve been battling a throat infection and a bad bout of flu for the past few weeks.
A few days ago I was in Notting Hill, mostly to find a Filipino restaurant that I’d been looking forward to trying. I think I’m not alone in saying that if it was a Filipino restaurant, run by Filipinos, Filipinos would flock to it because Filipinos would, if they could. I had eaten in another Filipino restaurant in London, in Charlotte Street, called Josephine’s. The decor was a little dated but I didn’t mind it because the service, and of course the food, was wonderful. Despite the fact that there were other customers, I felt well-looked after, not ignored.
That wasn’t the case in this other restaurant. I know I definitely looked Filipino and made the point of mentioning that I was Filipino and read about the restaurant which was why I wanted to try it but I got an indifferent response. Colder than lukewarm. Most Filipinos would ask where you lived, how long you lived there and what you did for work. This wouldn’t really be intrusive, it’s just the way Filipinos connect. There are about 300,000 Filipinos spread all over the UK, a mere drop in the ocean compared the general population. My experience, so far, has always been Filipinos wanting to connect with each other. But funnily enough, the warm and effusive welcome for a fellow Filipino that I was hoping for was not what I got. There was no effort to connect, there was no effort to engage.
The food was okay but the ordering wasn’t explained (the menus were on clipboards on the wall and you took one to the table then ordered at a make-shift looking counter), I had to ask. The options weren’t explained but after I asked if I could have water instead, I was told they could serve me water. I just felt like they weren’t interested in the business that I brought in. And I was massively, massively disappointed.
There was another person in the restaurant, a person who, from the conversation I could overhear was a friend. The person at the counter talked to this friend more than he talked to me. I think most restaurants, in this day and age, would fight tooth and nail for punters. I didn’t feel important to this establishment. I felt like I was an interruption to their conversation. I felt completely unwelcome.
Even now when I think about it, I feel like crying. The entire experience was that awful. I know I only paid £10 in total for my food. But I would’ve rather not gone now. I hope they treat other paying customers differently. More importantly, if they’re going use a Filipino word for their restaurant name, I pray that they treat fellow Filipinos better because the Pinoys that come to them want to come in and feel like they’re in a Filipino oasis in the hustle and bustle of London.
Service is as service done, but this was badly done. Very badly done. I’m certainly not going back to this Filipino restaurant.
Thoughts of Lent
I grew up going to church every Sunday. I will even go as far as to say that I have 2 home churches, one that I grew up in and one where I grew up spiritually in. I went to Sunday school. I sang in the children’s choir. I eventually taught Sunday school and daily vacation church school. My summers were spent in church and I was there nearly everyday! I sang in the church chancel choir and completely immersed myself in all the church activities. I spent so much time in church that I think it would be natural for me to miss church at Easter.
I think it’s fair to say that Easter is one of the busiest weeks in the Christian calendar, apart from Christmas. Funnily enough, there is a Filipino term (Pasko ng Pagkabuhay) which translated means Christmas of the Resurrection. We start counting down to this week from Ash Wednesday. But it all starts unfolding on Palm Sunday, when Christians celebrate Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem with a Palm Sunday service. The Catholics in the Philippines have their beautifully woven palm fronds blessed in church and they display this in their homes, mostly on their windows. I grew up in a Methodist church and while we didn’t have the blessing of palm fronds, children of the Sunday school class came into the church waving their palms to re-enact Jesus’ triumphant entry. This Sunday also marks the beginning of a very busy week.
I remember choir rehearsals in earnest because we would be singing during a series of services. Our church usually had a service for the last supper where we would have the washing of the feet ceremony. Our minister and members of the church would recreate the moment when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet in a display of his humility and servanthood. We would have a communion service to commemorate the last time Jesus broke bread with his followers before his death and when he foretold of Judas’ betrayal.
One service that is closest to my heart is the Seven Last Words on Good Friday. We start off the service at one o’clock in the afternoon. We have seven speakers, a mixture of lay members and ministers, all speaking about the biblical basis of Jesus’ seven last statements. Interspersed with the short sermons are songs by the choir. The choir chronicles the last 24 hours of Jesus’ life with songs commemorating the kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ journey carrying the cross through the Via Dolorosa, His nailing on the cross, His message to His disciple entrusting his mother into his care and His subsequent surrender of His spirit and His life into His Father’s hands. Each song that we sings makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end because all the songs just underline the great sacrifice that The Lord undertook to save the world. And because the songs paint a picture of how it was to be there, it just shakes me down to my foundations. What it must have felt to be there!
We usually finish at three o’clock which is popularly believed to be the time of his death. After all the speakers have finished their messages, and the choir have sung all their songs, the church is stripped as a sign of mourning. Because Christ is dead and we are bereft without His divine presence.
Black Saturday is usually celebrated in silence, in contemplation. Nothing really happens on a Saturday. But the choir does try to sneak in a few hours of practice because we do have a sunrise service and an Easter Sunday service to sing in.
Easter Sunday is celebrated in so many ways. But my favourite is a sunrise start. We have an Easter sunrise service where messages of hope, joy and salvation resound in the sermons and the songs from the choir. As a Christian, it is lovely to greet the brand new rays of the sun with the reassurance that Christ is not dead, He is alive and sitting at His Father’s right hand and waiting to come back for all of us. We have an Easter Sunday service (yes, after the sunrise service, which is usually an ecumenical service with all the Christian churches in our community) that finishes with a lovely (and very traditional) Easter egg hunt for the children.
While I will enjoy the odd chocolate bunny and the occasional chocolate egg, and enjoy the bank holiday and the respite from the rat race, the reason for the season will always resonate in my heart. I will always know that Easter is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection, Christ’s ascension to heaven. It is the fulfillment of the promises in the Bible.
Easter will always bring me hope, joy and a wonderful reminder of my salvation by Christ, but I will always feel a twinge in my heart because I will be missing my church family and the fellowship of Christians that I grew up with. It is always wonderful to celebrate the fulfillment of God’s promises with like-minded individuals.
The Breakfast Club tribute pancakes
It’s supposed to be Spring. The sun is supposed to be out. The weather should be warming up. But Mother Nature didn’t seem to get the memo. It is snowing almost everywhere in the UK today.
I’ve been craving The Breakfast Club‘s HamSoEggcited for some reason. I think it was because of the weather and the fact that I wasn’t feeling very well (I’ve got a bad cold, if anyone’s interested in offering tea and sympathy!). In my head, HamSoEggcited would cure all my ills. I had visions of lovely fluffy pancakes, melting cheese sandwiched in ham slices and a perfectly fried sunny side up egg with the yolk all gooey and runny!
But because London wasn’t exactly a hop, skip and jump away, I thought I’d try to replicate it in my tiny kitchen. I found a great recipe for fluffy pancakes recently and tweaked it so that the pancakes were how I wanted them to be. I had gammon ham in the fridge and cheese that needed using up so I set about recreating the sweet-savoury pancake stack.
My recipe for fluffy pancakes is below:
Ingredients:
- 135g self-raising flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp salt
- 3 tbsp caster sugar
- 150ml milk
- 1 large egg, lightly beaten
- 30ml melted butter or olive oil
- butter to cook pancakes
Directions:
- Combine the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a large bowl with a balloon whisk (I love using a balloon whisk to mix dry ingredients because it does it really quickly and really well!).
- In a jug, whisk the egg and milk together. Then add the olive oil.
- Combine the flour mixture and the egg-milk mixture and beat until you have a smooth batter. If there are any lumps, this should disappear soon with a little more mixing. Let the batter stand for a few minutes.
- Heat a non-stick frying pan over medium heat and add a knob of butter and swivel the butter around to coat the pan, until all the butter has melted. Add a ladle of the batter to the pan. The batter will be thick, but don’t worry because this is how the batter should be. Wait for the pancake to bubble and for the bubbles to burst. Loosen the edges with a fish slice and flip over. Cook until both sides are slightly golden brown. The pancake should rise to about 1 cm thick.
- Repeat until all the batter is used up. This makes 4 large pancakes. I know that might not sound like much but a stack of 2 pancakes are more than generous for one person!
- Serve with lashings of syrup of your choice, and extra butter if you are so inclined!
To make the HamSoExcited, I kept each pancake warm in a low oven and each time I made a pancake, I stacked it with a folded piece of gammon with a slice of cheese inside (the gammon). I did a stack of 3 pancakes and doused the pancakes (VERY liberally) with golden syrup (because I’d run out of maple syrup). Leaving the pancakes in the oven while I cooked the eggs gave the pancakes a little crunch. When I placed the fried egg over the pancake stack I had to take a photo because it was soooooo pretty. Probably not as pretty as The Breakfast Club’s HamSoEggcited but it was close enough, I thought. It certainly tasted like it!
I posted the photo on Instagram and the people managing The Breakfast Club’s instagram account thought it was a pretty impressive effort!
Remembering The Cavendish
It was horribly busy at work today and tomorrow is going to be an even longer day. It’s Budget Day tomorrow and the firm I work for has a post budget presentation for its clients. Tomorrow will be a long day because we’ll be prepping materials for the presentations.
Ah well! I’m in my happy place though because I’m still thinking about last Tuesday when I had afternoon tea at The Cavendish.
I’d never been to The Cavendish but it was easy enough to get to because it was right behind Fortnum and Mason. The hotel was understated but it was quietly elegant.
We gave our names at bar concierge and I felt fairly special as we were made to feel like they were expecting us. We were led to a quite corner of the Lounge Bar and were given menus so we could choose our teas.
Afternoon Tea at The Cavendish is from 2 to 5PM everyday and they charge £18 per person. This includes a pot of tea for each person, a selection of finger sandwiches: Wicks Manor smoked ham with whole grain mustard, egg mayonnaise with rocket salad, Scottish smoked salmon with cucumber and cream cheese, and cheddar cheese and pickle; a selection of pastries, tartlets and chocolate truffles and scones with jam and clotted cream. The £18 also includes a glass of champagne but I opted for the non-alcoholic option of passion fruit juice.
On the menu it looked like a substantial amount of food but I wasn’t prepared for the amount of food that was brought to the table. It was a LOT! We ordered afternoon tea for two people but the food that was brought to the table could have easily fed four people very generously.
I loved the service because the staff were wonderfully friendly and attentive. We were looked after well. I appreciated the fact that they offered to refill our teapots with hot water. The teapots held about two cups worth of tea and water costs next to nothing, but not ever establishment will offer to refill your teapot. I loved that about the Cavendish. While it is expected for most establishments to offer a non-alcoholic option, not every place does. We were given a lot of options to replace our glasses of champagne and I must say, the passion fruit juice that I had was wonderfully fresh!
When the afternoon tea tray was brought to the table, it was brought to us with a slight flourish and the waiter explained the contents of each plate. There were 2 scones for each person with large pots filled with delicious clotted cream and lovely jam. There were more than enough sandwiches which were generously filled. I love smoked salmon and the sandwiches were stuffed to bursting! You certainly get what you pay for and more!
Am now looking at my calendar and planning my next visit!
The sweet element was the mini cakes, tartlets and chocolate truffles and they were lovely! They were cute, individual pieces and very beautifully made.
At one point during the meal, I certainly worried about not being able to finish the food (we couldn’t manage it in the end) because there was so much of it. I would definitely recommend having afternoon tea at The Cavendish. The venue is quiet and has the element of privacy even though the space is quite open plan. You get wonderfully attentive service from the staff and the food is definitely value for money.
I’m certainly looking forward to the next visit!
Good vibes!
Today wasn’t such a good day because I am currently in the throes of quite a bad migraine episode. The pain meds are fading and I’m due to drink my next round of painkillers.
I wanted to share this photo with y’all though because I thought it was such a positive little slogan that it won’t fail to make you smile. This was taken outside the Spitalfields branch of The Breakfast Club. They used to have this note on their receipts but for some reason the last receipt I got from them didn’t have this little cheerful tidbit. I guess they thought having the sign outside the shop would be enough. And, in my case, it was enough; and on the day that I saw that sign it was certainly a good day!
Good vibes sent out into the cosmos and all that! Even if you start the day with a pounding headache or even if something negative manages to wiggle itself into the start of your day, if you tell yourself that you’re going to have a good day, you are. Don’t let the negativity get you done!
If you tell yourself you’re going to have a good day, you are!
Thank you!
I must say that I am quite pleased whenever someone comes to visit the blog.
I know it’ll sound cheesy when I say this: but I am always challenged to write better when people come to visit. It’s all about the quality of the posts, really. It’s all about content. And every time someone likes a post, or starts following the blog, it reminds me that I have a responsibility to the people who follow the blog: to write better, to post better photos and to share something relevant.
I started the blog because I wanted to embrace the fact that I am all about the food. But I’m beginning to realise that whilst food might be the centre of my writing universe, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all of my writing world. I started with a tag line on the blog that said “There is no love more sincerer than the love of food.” I took my food posts from a previous blog and brought them over to this blog. But I soon realised that concentrating on food did not allow me to express all my thoughts. Sure, it’s good to have a niche blog, but I have opinions and I have thoughts that I most certainly love sharing–mostly, selfishly, so that I can validation; that I can say that I’m not the only one with these thoughts. It’s good to get validation and it’s even better when someone you don’t know in some other part of the world says, “Yeah, I think that too!”
If you’ve dropped by the blog, if you’ve liked a post, if you’ve clicked that button to follow the blog, let me just say “Thank you!” for without y’all to spur me on, I don’t think I’d put my thoughts out there!
This is my second thank you post, but I feel the need to say it over and over again. You all make my heart sing (insert Dido’s Thank You song here)! 🙂
Yellywelly 