Near my work is a lovely little park adjacent to a street food market. I usually have my lunch there when it’s not raining and am a sucker for the market’s mushrooms stall (held by Sporeboys) whose people make wonderul portobello, tomatoes and haloumi burgers. God, Halumi is the best food I have discovered this year.

The park is home to wonderful lavender plants and a wild garden, and I couldn’t resist but to pick some branches the other day - is it illegal? Point is, I decided it was time to either learn how to make an orange and lavender cake, or get creative with it. I mixed some buds ( two teaspoons) with soft brown sugar in a glass jar, and topped it with half a vanilla pod. I am expecting a very fragrant sugar in a couple of weeks - I already tried it after a couple of days and was pleasantly surprised.

I think I will use it in spicy teas or on fresh baguette with butter. I am not sure about a potential use in cakes, but who knows?

In other news, X-files movie = D-day minus 2. To say I am ridiculously hopeful and excited is an understatement but to be fair, even if the movie turns out to be painfully bad, I am certain I will be one defend it. Which brings me to something even more embarrassing: I had a great woman over for dinner last night, who also happens to be quite the feminist. I am not sure how this conversation started, but we realised that we both had something for Charmed (gasp) and Grey’s fucking anatomy (double gasp). Oh boy, did it make me feel better to know a hardcore feminist, like me, was totally down with retarded TV shows, as well as the good ones*.

*Mark and I finished season 4 of The Wire and while Six Feet Under is still my all time favourite, damn, all the TV scenesters were right. This show is amazing.

I have a new blog entry up on Comment is Free re: Jezebel. A bit late to the game but whaddyaknow, still trying to make a point.

Here’s a recipe for a good blogosphere scandal: take two sassy, trendsetter bloggers writing for one of Gawker Media’s most popular sites. Invite them to a comedy show that will be broadcast online and have them interviewed by a ruthless and nosy host eager to discuss their sex lives. Add a lot of free alcohol to the mix, and you have the perfect ingredients for the viral equivalent of a car crash. [read the rest here]

Strangely accurate, according to my delicious tags:

Less accurate, according to my blogs keywords, but how much do I love the massive PASTRY  tag?

The oldest blogger in the world, Olive Riley, died yesterday and I am not sure why but it breaks my heart. She was, I think, 106 108 years old. And I really, really loved her blog (not sure why it seems broken now, perhaps bandwidth issues).

Update: blog replacement here.

Is there such a thing as Sunday depression? For as long as I can remember I have always been feeling down, bored and vaguely blue on Sundays. The excitement of having days off is gone, the weather is always gray if not worst, I don’t watch to TV anymore (if at all, really) and the only thing which could potentially warm my heart is a book. With loads of caffeine.Today would be good as any to start breaking this tradition, and I decided to get busy instead. I made a free-form nectarine and apricot pie with almond and two cans of raspberry+apricot jam. If the happiness subsides, I might finish that blog entry about Jezebel and slip under my new bed sheets (something to put on my ‘10 things to make me happy list’) with a boyfriend, a cat and The Wire. I would love to start a sewing project but for now I am too intimidated by awesome sites such as this one.

Free-form nectarine, almond and raspberry pie

Ingredients

- 340g shortcrust pastry (you can make it or buy it if you are lazy, like I did today)

- 3/4 teaspoon ground ginder

- 2 tablespoons ground almonds

- 2 nectarines, 3 apricots, handful of raspberries

- 1 egg white

- 3 tablespoons soft sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar

- 1 tablespoon of raspberry jam (I used my handmade strawberry-rhubarb one)

Roll the pastry to a 30 cm diameter and set aside. In a bowl, mix the fruits cut in pieces, ginger and sugar. Take the pastry and make a circle of 8 cm of diameter in the middle using the jam, and add the ground almonds on top. Add the fruits n top of the mix and fold the pastry over, as pictured. Sprinkle some sugar on top, and brush the pastry with the egg white. Add almond flakes on top if you feel like it.

Bake in the oven @ 250 degrees for 35 minutes, serve hot or cold.

I really want to write about the whole Jezebel ‘thinking and drinking’ fiasco, because the whole thing got me livid and torn in more ways than one. But I’m not ready to articulate why I find it so appalling just yet. My patience is also wearing thin when it comes to those flash-debates, and these days I uncharacteristically tend to come to the conclusion that people should get a life - after all, it’s just online drama.

—–

I recently remembered something quite odd. When interning in Canada I worked with three lovely but very different women, one of whom had started at the same time as me. She was about five years older and was quite brilliant, but for some reason I was afraid she thought of me as a bit dull. Perhaps my age, perhaps the non-flueng English, who knows. I am not sure about the details, but one day she came to the office telling me she had read my blog.

“It kind of changed my perception of you”, she said. “I did not know you were intersted in so many things, it makes me see you in a different light.”

And that, my friends, is serious food for thought. Did the fact that I was writing on the interwebs in 2003 made me somehow more interesting? Was I more articulate blogging rather than in real life? Did I not have any conversational skills, or struck her as an introvert? Who the fuck knows - and the same questions remain, even though I would say my close friends always liked me better than they liked my blog (hint: they never cared enough to read it).

—–

Mais, passons… Here’s yet another recipe to cheer up our horrible gloomy rainy summer evenings.

Spinach, bacon and nutmeg-filled filo pastry.

Ingredients (serves 2)

- A medium bag of spinach

- A quarter nutmeg, grated

- 4 slices of bacon, trimmed

- 3 cloves of garlic, cut in small pieces

- 2 sheets of small filo pastry for each serving

- 1/2 cup of riccotta

- cherry tomatoes to taste

And now to the cooking:

Fry the garlic cloves in a bit of olive oil , add spinach with 1/4 cup of water, and wait for the spinach to reduce. In a seperate pan, fry some bacon cut in tiny pieces and garlic. When the spinach is ready, drain the water and add the nutmeg, followed by the bacon - fry for another minute in low heat.

Take two filo pastry sheets and place them perpendicularly. Place some the spinach mixture in the middle, add a spoonful of ricotta and two halves of one cherry tomatoes. Carefully fold the pastry and fry in two teaspoon of olive oil, 2 minutes on each side, medium heat. Add salt + pepper if necessary, and enjoy.

“But I think because we in some sense have shared the ups and downs of literary life together for so many years that it’s almost like breathing.” (via)

I think it was my friend Faith who first mentioned ‘What I loved’, the second novel written by Siri Hustvedt. One small detail pushed me to buy the book as soon as she mentioned it: Hustvedt is Paul Austers’ wife, and of course Auster is one of my all time favourite artist.

I loved her novel and quickly read her other works through the years. And as it happened, I just finished her new book, The Sorrows of an American. I thought it was wonderful, but one thing stopped me in my tracks and forced me to reflect is how similar her writing is to her husband’s.

I am absolutely not interested in knowing who was ‘first’ in writing in such a style, who thought of using serendipity and coincidences with such gusto, or who decided to paint post 9/11 NY in such lights. But the obvious question are at which point does a marriage start to really influence an artist’s thought process? Would both Auster and Hustvedt write in similar manners should they not have met? Do they talk and inspire one another during the writing process?

In retrospect, and having read more than my share of Auster interviews, I recognized much of his (their?) lives in her words: the quick mention of holidays and villa renting in Provence, the beautifully described white middle class guilt, the interest in the occult and the paranormal (Mr Vertigo), the symbolic metaphor (The Country of Last Things), the celebration of multiculturalism (Smoke) or the postmodern love letter to America.

They are, of course, many differences in their prose. I think Hustvedt does the sensual and erotic better than her husband, and she undeniably is more subtle than him in myriad of ways - I would even dare to say this is due to her gender, but I would hate to jump the gun.

So where does that leave me? Oh, yes: when two artists -or two human beings, for that matter- spend so much time together, do they end up seeing things with the same eyes? Are they inspired by the same details in their environment? When I try to think of different couple using the same medium as a creative outlets ( Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, hell, even Van Gogh and Gaugin), I think it’s definitely safe to say there is an element of competition and envy in their relationship. As Auster’s books are receiving less and less positive reviews (fools!) while his wife’s novels are widely acclaimed, I wonder if he’s just proud to be with her, or just frankly peeved.

… Did I mention his name is not in the book’s ackowledgments?

Wanstead park in Epping: the best London discovery we’ve made in a long time - except of course when we got lost and had to walk an hour between highways, Presbyterian churches and depressing nursing homes.

Yes, I suppose there was something quite nice in biking home after work under the absolute pouring rain, Patrick Wolf’s Stars blasting away in my headphones. Next: trying out my new sewing machine.

When I ask my boyfriend if he likes his body, the answer I tend to get is “of course I do. Because it’s MY body, and mine alone. It does what I want it to do”.

Another thing that Mark have told me is that he likes my legs because they are strong. And he means it: I don’t think he is just trying to tell me that he likes them in spite of them being fat, big or oversized or even in spite of them having cellulite. I initially found his compliment to be quite disturbing, because I never thought of them as strong. Except for the occasional worry which goes along the lines of “I wish I had smaller thighs” to “I can’t wear a short skirt today because I didn’t wax”, I don’t think much of my legs - they are merely limbs which bike to work everyday, and walk miles every week. But strong? I didn’t ever stop to think of it, nevermind thinking of it as a good thing.

And it’s nonsense, isn’t it? That all women tend to be at their most happy when (warning, feminism 101 coming up) they are at they smallest, thinnest and in many cases, frailest. Few of us, I dare to guess, ever stop to think “damn, look at those big bulky legs, they could carry me around the country easy” or “check out my arm muscles, I bet I can destroy scores next time we go to the amusement park“.

I was reminded of this very point this week when reading about the Wimbeldon tennis coverage in the British media (1). While the first two days of the tournament focused solely on what Maria Sharapova wore (shorts! shock, horror!), we were then bombared with pictures of Nadal/Murray flexing his fucking arm muscle/ debating his level of fitness on the majority of national newspapers’ covers. Of course, as an incitement to praise them for being so strong and masculine - crowd movers.

When was the time a woman was publicly praised for being muscular? In tennis, it was probably Amélie Moresmo - but then again she wasn’t praised, god forbid, she was mocked for being a lesbian and ‘looking like a man’.

I mean fucking hell, give a girl a break - either that or I am going to sit and re-watch Million Dollar Baby which as ghastly as it was, at least had the courage to show a woman kicking serious ass.

(1) As boring as tennis is, at least Wimbeldon now pays equal money across the board to both men and women. This was decided in 2007. Um, yay?