as a teaser for the recounting of kee's visit, i offer you this representation of when we found ourselves sodden on a hillside in the peak district. there was even a farmer with a tractor, though we didn't talk to him. and our car worked. and we weren't miserable, and weren't there by mistake. but we were very, very wet and cold, with utterly inappropriate footwear.

bad [food] porn

they'd better sell green and red m&m's here. otherwise christmas won't come.

i have a whole host of pics from kee's visit last week (this refrain sounds a bit familiar), but am only going to share a few today (i like to tantalize, titillatingly). blahblahblah (that's me being all academic) said that england and the us are two countries separated by a common language (where does canada fit in? they should protest. loudly.). entire, excellent blogs are devoted to the subject, as are a myriad of books which tend to be aimed at the american audience, since, as we all know, having any sort of uk accent at all immediately makes you more intelligent and sophisticated. anyway, point being that i was prepared for some translation issues (moreish. look it up.). however, coming from a family with serious english heritage, as well as from a country with a sizeable connection to the island, i failed to realize the much larger gulf between myself and my surroundings: the culinary one. i'm not even talking about jellied eels, and i like haggis. despite the fact that i grew up eating roast beef on many a sunday, turns out that a lot of culinary similarities are rather surfacey. for example, they sell bread pans here not by size, but by the weight of the loaf. (so what do you do if you're making a pumpernickel/rye one day, and an angel food cake the next?) and, as kee and i discovered when we set out to make jules' rolls-of-divinity for thanksgiving (you can have thanksgiving w/out the turkey. you can't have it w/out the rolls.), there's no such thing as shortening. you can easily find duck fat, lard, and suet (of both the meat and the vegetable varieties), but no shortening.

panic.

despair.

tears.

rage.

after scouring the shelves of at least five different stores, i finally settled upon the suspiciously-named and malevolent sounding 'baking fat' in the hopes that it would render the rolls at least somewhat recognizable. upon arriving home, i realized that i was also missing some other notable components to the baking exercise, such as the all important rolling pin. (they use them here; i just don't have any kitchen equipment and am too poor and miserly to buy any, choosing to spend my spare pounds on concerts where i can't see the stage and thus fall asleep.) this lack didn't stop me during my freshman, sophomore, or junior years of undergrad, and it wasn't going to stop me now (though discovering that someone had gotten a hold of my bank details and was draining my account via various tabacs in france almost did. it was the thought of the rolls that kept me going. and kee. and a viewing of white christmas.)

it's not instagram, but i documented a few elements of the process for you:

This is what 'baking fat' crescent roll dough looks like. i was going to save half the batch and make it for Christmas, but ended up taking it  out of the freezer the next day. 

The process. Hot chocolate helps with both the rolling process and the eating process.

The baking fat. One benefit to shortening (other than the fact that it takes right) is that it's generally white, which is less disturbing than the lurid orangey-yellow of baking fat, which makes it feel like you're actually dumping fat in what you're going to stuff in your face a few hours later. There are no tomatoes in the recipe. I was experimenting with various rolling pin replacements. The tomato can was helpful because of its weight, but ultimately the hot chocolate canister won out.

The final result. Not too bad. Not as good as jules', but they never are.

back to the hunt for the m&m's. mince pies are great and all, but pastry and cadbury's chocolate will only get you so far.

move over, macgyver

i know, i know, too much radio silence, and i have much to report: meetings with living distant relatives, cemetery hunting for dead distant relatives, trips to exotic places like sheffield, bonfire night fireworks, and more. loads of photos waiting to be introduced to the world. but i feel it very important to state for the record that there are definite drawbacks to living alone in a large, albeit at times unbearably exciting, city in which one knows precisely nobody. one of these is that when you slice your finger wide open whilst attempting to slice your egg bagel from the local bakery and realize in a moment of horror as you watch the blood pouring down that not only are there are no band-aids in your apartment but that you probably need stitches but you don't really have health coverage here and the hospital is a mile away and walking to it with a finger wrapped in a dishtowel would be awfully inconvenient...there is nobody to run to the store for you to pick up some gauze and tape and, hell, some glue because a trip to the emergency room would be awfully expensive.

never fear: as i started going into mild shock while sitting on the kitchen floor with said dish towel wrapped around said finger, i maintained enough self-awareness to reach up to the counter and grab said bagel because blood sugar levels or something, and, after eating both it and a couple of oreos, fashioned a bandage of some sort out of strips of dish towel (sorry, landlord) fastened with brown packing tape. it's not soaked with blood yet, so i think i can forego both the er and the glue.

first the hot water, then the oven, then the elevator w/out working lights (i can affirm that riding in an almost pitch black elevator is, indeed, beyond the pale of creepy to the territory of blood curdling), now my finger. despite its best efforts, i won't let this apartment destroy me. i shall conquer it.

this is war.