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 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.

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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).

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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.

During an afternoon stroll in Soho yesterday, Mark and I stopped in front of markets stalls selling boxes of strawberries for just one pound (it was five o’clock, and I love market bargains). Upon buying a box and tasting a couple of strawbs, I immediately did a u-turn to buy three more. That’s how good they were, and we spent a few minutes cursing the very existence of Tesco under our breath. Long live street markets.

Today I set myself up to make some jam, my new favourite past time since I made raspberry-rhubarb spread in France last week. And by god, it is the simplest of all things to cook, and the best tasting one. Not that I am blowing my own horn or anything but damn, even Mark says it’s the best jam he ever had (not the France one mind, but the another one I made last week, since the fuckers at the airport took my container).

The whole process takes less than an hour, is very relaxing to boot, and your entire house will have the most wickedly gorgeous smell. I doubt I even have to write the recipe down, but given that many great sites give very different advice, I’ll give you my grandmother’s.

Ingredients (makes a medium jar):

- 400 grams of strawberries

- 250 grams of sugar

- Juice of 1 lemon

- 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla essence; or half a vanilla pod

And now let’s get cooking:

- Wash fruits, remove the stems and cut them in two. If you are using vanilla pods, add the seeds now. Mash the fruits with a potatoes masher or better yet, with your hands. Add the sugar and let it sit for 10 minutes.

- Put the mixture in a saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. After 8 minutes, add the lemon juice (it makes to jam into a gooey consistency, and you won’t need pectin). Keep on stirring occasionally for another 15 minutes, and gradually remove the foam. The jam is ready when the jam is still liquid, but is setting quickly after one minute in the fridge (test it with a tiny bit of jam).

- Pour in clean jar when still hot, close very tight and turn it upside down. Alternatively, you can also EAT IT ALL IN ONE SETTING.

Take my word for it, it brings a whole different meaning to the French adage “like children around a pot of jam”.

Anyone with a spare Clinton sticker to put on my laptop? I’ll pay for the postage… And hell, how about a McCain one?

After a blog post that amused me a long while ago, an epiphany (spending 6 pounds [12 dollars?]a day on lunches is bad) and an awful lot of public queries, e-mailing Japon, Germany and a hunt trhough e-bay, I finally received what I’ve been purchasing for three months: a Bento box.

Good bye Starbucks! Good bye Pret! Good bye Nusa kitchen! Good bye fries for lunch (an abomination by my french standards). Hello, healthy food! And hey, I’m helping my man Al Gore by reducing carbon dioxide emissions as well (even if my deli.cio.us tag currently suggests that I have a soft spot for Obama rather than the official Climate Change Fighter ™, but we’ll see about that).