I'm in San Francisco!

Carrying on a whirlwind romance.  Living in an appartment that has a bath with clawed feet and a woman who practises rope dancing in the front room, the whole owned by an ethnomusicologist.  With plans to try every burrito in the city.  And taco.  And pupusa.  And tamale.  And wander about and watch the scenery.  And go walking in some parks.  And learn to surf.  Hopefully, it's a last hurrah before the new job, but even if it isn't quite that it will still be amazing.

Didn't bring a digital camera, only filmy ones.  iPhone blogging or stealing Tom's camera will ensue.  Ta ta, I need to go and find some clothes then some brunch...

Autumnal busyness.

It's been a while, hasn't it? I ought to be better behaved about keeping this up. Lots of things have been happening, not least that I got promoted. Yay! And I'm moving house AGAIN. Third time in 9 months. I hate the graduate life. Being a student was SO much better. For the next three weeks I'm living in North Cambridge with John (Christian's old housemate) and Andrew... Techie house extraordinaire. Then I move BACK, get it BACK, to the road I was living in before - this will be the THIRD TIME I move into a house on that road. Dammit. At least it's not the same house. The rats are going on holiday to Christian's for a bit while I build them a shed in the garden to live in and work out how to get power to them so that I can plug in their heater. That house is rapidly becoming more and more like a zoo.

What else? I've spent every weekend for the last month in a capital city. 1) London, 2) Edinburgh (where I made a brief appearance at the Fringe, where I made the famous lemon cake as ever, and saw some great shows, got drunk with Matt and Chris and had an amazing curry), 3) Belfast with Elaine (where we made pasta and went to the seaside), and 4) London. I'm in Cornwall this weekend, then the Scilly Isles for a bit, and then I come back and go back to London to cook for the crowd of friends that live there - three of whom have moved to BOROUGH HIGH STREET, putting me within 5 minutes walk of a certain Market. I've already claimed my weekly sleeping spot...

It's getting autumnal over here, without really showing us a summer that was anything more than sticky. The shops are beginning to get over the summer veg, (I had to hunt for peppers from a reasonable location in Tescos yesterday), so I guess I must regretfully abandon my hopes that the sun was going to come out in September. I did find butternut squash, however. Yay squash! Andrew bought a monster one a couple of months ago that sat in the fridge for AGES until I came up with something to make from it. Squash makes amazing soup (roast chopped up squash with thyme/sage/both at 200 degrees C until soft (about 40 minutes-1 hour, depending on age of squash and how much chopping you did), fry some chopped onion and garlic for 10 minutes or so until soft but not coloured, add the squash and some good veg stock, bring to the boil, puree, and add a hefty quantity of grated parmesan...), but I'm bored by soup most of the time. I opted for curry that time, instead. It came out quite well, but we did eat it for about a week. This time I went for pasta, and made sure that I bought the smallest squash I could find!

Squash is pretty keen on thyme and sage as platefellows, teamed with something salty - like parmesan or bacon - to complement its sweetness. Hence my pasta, really.


Creamy Pasta with Squash and Bacon
(veggies, just leave out the bacon and have more parmesan at the end - when frying the sage, do it gently but for long enough that the leaves go crispy or they might be tough)

For 2

- one very small squash (about 300g, at a very rough guess...something about 4 or 5 inches high, probably)
- 4 rashers good organic smoked bacon
- 1 dessertspoon chopped fresh sage leaves
- 100ml single cream, or a couple of tablespoons of full fat Greek yoghurt (I'm not sure actually which comes out less fattening, if you can find the lower fat single cream that Elmea make, of which I approve)
- about 150ml white wine
- black pepper
- olive oil
- 200g sturdy pasta shapes, e.g. caesarrece or penne
- salt for the pasta water
- parmesan to serve

Chop the squash into fairly small dice no bigger than 1inch cubes (no need to peel - that way there are more vitamins and more texture...), and mix with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Spread it out on a baking sheet and roast at 200 degrees C for around 40 minutes, until soft and crisping around the edges. If you clean the seeds off a bit, spread them on another baking sheet and roast for about 10 minutes until brown and crisp, you'll have a snack to eat while you wait.

Put the pasta on about ten mintues before the squash is going to be ready. Dice the bacon and fry in another tablespoon of olive oil with the sage, until the fat runs and meat is crispy. Add the white wine and allow to reduce for a minute or two. Add the squash and turn it over in the juices, so it can soak up the flavours. Turn the heat down and add the cream. Drain the pasta and add that too, along with a good grind of black pepper. Stir together and allow to heat through for a minute or two before serving with plenty of parmesan and the rest of the bottle of wine. Some sort of green salad would be good on the side.

French pics.

framboises jaunes
Originally uploaded by hazelsheard

I've just posted the pictures I took in the French Alps - see here. I wanted to share this one with you...have you ever seen YELLOW raspberries?! They tasted, actually, just the same as pink ones, but they're an awesome colour. Weird.

Particular French favourites include this one, which is a supershroom. Have decided mushrooms make awesome photo subjects, along with snails. I even passed that particular fetish on to my dad, who spent a quantity of time photographing a French snail which had considerable size on my humble Cambridge specimen. Other highlights were a waterfall picture I'm really quite pleased with, and this one of the cloud flowing down the hill over a town called Avoriaz (which you can't see, it's under the cloud at the top of a sheer cliff...).

France.

It's wet - torrential thunderstorms and so on, such that the lights keep flickering - so I'm taking the opportunity to write this instead, while trying to get the CD player beside me to play more or less anything that isn't Dido or Jacko. I was aiming for a Kings CD I saw they had the other day, but that turned out to be entirely Christmassy, so I dug out one of those 'Classic' compilation things. Well. Don't try and get the train all the way from St Albans to somewhere approaching Geneva on the same day. It's an error. It does bring home to you the fact that the French Alps are A Very Long Way, but having driven over them a fair few times for holidays of one sort or another, I don't need that bringing home to me. The scenery is great, and the chalet/hotel place we're staying is gorgeous. Slightly random selection of other guests, but that's the way of these things. It's an adventure type place - the area is lousy with VTT (velo touts-terrains (probably got agreements wrong...sorry), or mountain biking, to you and me) centres and places to jump off mountains with curtain over your head. I've done a fair amount of walking with the parents, such that now my knees are well and truly ouch, and have also been canyoning and rafting. I wasn't sure the canyoning would have been really up my street, and it nearly wasn't - I'm not good at heights, and it basically involves sliding, climbing, abseiling and jumping down a very cold waterfall at the bottom of a gorge. I love the water and the messing about in streams bit, but am really not very keen on the jumping bit unless I know exactly where I'm going and it's not too far down. Least I didn't have to much in the way of bridges or much hanging on the end of a rope that I wasn't in control of. I only froze properly once, and ended up grabbing a rope I really shouldn't have grabbed because I now have beautiful rope burn all across my left hand. Bah.

The food's good, too - the chef in the chalet is awesome, but the area has things like a cheese that melts so perfectly you just need it on its own to make a cheese sauce. They use it to make a thing called Tartiflette, which is fried potatoes, onions and bacon, made into a gratin with the cheese, called reblochon. I reckon it could be adapted pretty easily with red pepper pieces instead of the bacon. A slightly more authentic replacement would be capers, but I don't recall really liking them, so pepper will do.

Despite the fact that it's raining now, the weather's been great. We were walking yesterday, and it was clear enough to see Mont Blanc, which is pretty rare from here. We're more or less on the Swiss border, at a place called Morzine, just south of Geneva. The clarity had its downside though, in that it was HOT yesterday, and I had a killer headache when I came home. Bah. I have a bit of a tan though, which is always something. It's pretty uneven, but a few weeks in Cornwall should sort it out I suppose. Meh.

I suppose I ought to start job hunting when I get back, but it's not really going to be practical. I'll have two weeks, then perhaps some time in Edinburgh, though that's now looking pretty unlikely, then a month in Cornwall. It's hardly a suitable set of locations for possible job interviews in London, really, though I can at a pinch drop things in either of those locations and go home to be interviewed on any day apart from the actual run at the Minack. I'm not all that sure how long it'll take for things like that to process - from application to interview to starting a job, so I don't quite know when the best time to start doing this is, if I want to start work at about the beginning of September. I still haven't got the energy for it...spending chunks of every day in a complete funk about everything at all, where the best option is just to hide under the duvet and hope it's not there when I wake up. It's not that I'm scared of doing a job, or even getting one, just that I really don't see the point in anything. Meh.