A Week in LLG, from birthday suppers to book signings
(Signing the first batch of pre-ordered copies of my cookbook in my publisher’s boardroom on Friday am.)
Last week was mainly about working like a fiend in the day, to try to clear admin before LFW started, and food and friends. Jo, whom I have been friends with since high school, some twenty-four years or so, came up to London from Wiltshire for work, and landed on my office sofa for the night on Monday. We spent the evening in the pub opposite my flat, so she could drink cider – you can take the girl out of the West Country- and talking nineteen to the dozen. (She is also the owner of Amelia, god-daughter no.1 (I have five).)
I cooked supper on Tuesday at home for Hannah, Virginia and Bianca, (using recipes from the book, of course: the cauliflower cheese soup, mushrooms and cream filled winter squash, and an apple pudding cake made with windfalls from my father’s garden.)
Wednesday was drinks with Jamie in my other local, the fantastic The Spread Eagle in Camden, which has had a recent refurb. They serve excellent chips, and a very good Bloody Mary, although the fiver pint is quite hard to swallow.
I rounded off the evening with a GU Puds chocolate fondant at Mark Sargeant’s restaurant Plum Spilt Milk in the Great Northern Hotel in King’s Cross Station. The evening was to celebrate the new salted caramel, and white chocolate puds, and was most amusing, thanks to my dinner companions: the lovely Sarah Alcock from Sainsbury’s Magazine, Fred Ponnavoy, who you may remember cooked this EPIC dinner at my house a few years ago for a dinner I hosted for GU, and Mark.
And their fondants.
Thursday was Tara’s birthday and, because I like to create a rod for my back, I blithely offered to cater supper at her home in Muswell Hill for ten people, and make her birthday cake. I should have been a bit more organised, and prepped the day before, but no matter.
Tara wanted picky bits, as we were planning on a Perudo dice tournament, so I decided on a loosely Turkish menu. After manically trying to clear my desk, Remy and I jumped in the tiny tin can around 3pm, and headed to Green Lanes, the Turkish part of town, to stock up on bread, bakhlava, soft Turkish cheese, filo, and huge bunches of flat leaf parsley.
En route, I spotted a beautiful florist – Ginger Lily by Newington Green, and parked up to investigate. Proper lovely.
I’m afraid we sat in the front of the car, literally cramming the hot cheesy bread in our gobs. All of the glamour, all of the time.
Then I spent a frantic two hours making a birthday cake, hoping it would cool before I had to ice it, roasting aubergines for baba ghanoush, layering olive oil-slicked filo pastry sheets to stuff with a cheese, beaten egg and chopped parsley mixture, pureeing butter beans with thyme, roasted garlic, and a stream of oil, and making guacamole (not exactly Turkish but delicious). Remy acted as a wonderful commis, bashing the hell out of pomegranates with a wooden spoon, and prepping crudites for the dips.
My milk chocolate cake with milk chocolate fudge icing and smashed Ferrero Rocher filing tasted great, but bears very little visual resemblance to the one I baked, iced and photographed for the book: there was definitely some icing sliding about in the car on the way to Muswell Hill, due to not letting the cake layers cool properly. Oh and running out of icing sugar. (This is why there is no point getting your knickers in a twist about home presentation of food: so long as it tastes good, that’s the important thing.)
I’d just like to say that I whopped ass in the first round of Perudo, even though it must be eight years or so since I last played with Russell. Then I crashed out on the second. Pah.
Very first thing Friday morning, before the first day of London Fashion Week kicked off in earnest, saw Remy and I at the UK GAP flagship store on Oxford Street, next to Selfridges, to check out their excellent new black denim range, and get a pair custom monogrammed. Then it was all about the fashions, of which more later, and a quick side bar to my publisher Quadrille’s shiny new offices on the South Bank to sign a bunch of books. (That was quite exciting, signing a book for the first time.)
Saturday had me leaving the shows at 4pm to get ready for the evening event of the Chiswick Book Festival, which saw Harper’s Bazaar’s Helen Brocklebank in conversation with me, to talk about my life as a writer; the journey that led me to write my first cookery book, Friends Food Family: Recipes and Secrets from LibertyLondonGirl; and the books that have nurtured and nourished me along the way.
In an age of cameraphones, I’m all about not looking like I have been dragged through a hedge backwards if I can possibly help it, so I went off to see my friends at BLOW Ltd in Covent Garden to get zhuzhued beforehand.
Talk done (again, more of this later), Brig, Will, Rach and I retired to the members bar at High Road House to drink Champagne, and eat burgers and chips to celebrate my first ever book event.
