Second Helpings – August 2009
Aug 31st, 2009 by admin
The monthly summary for August and what a food-filled month it was too!
My London restaurant reviews are featured on Urbanspoon, as are those of fellow food bloggers. To celebrate their thousandth blogger worldwide joining them, Urbanspoon wrote a post highlighting some of their blogger members, including World Foodie Guide. If you’re a food blogger, you should consider joining Urbanspoon. It’s really easy to link to it from your restaurant review posts.
Eurostar invited a small group of food bloggers on a culinary day trip to Lille, France as part of their Little Break, Big Difference campaign. It was a tiring day but packed with foodie activities and I really enjoyed myself. If you love food, Lille is definitely a destination city. I can’t wait to go back again and explore all the little shops and restaurants we discovered.
August was an unusually good month for eating out – Koba – my favourite Korean restaurant in London; Launceston Place – which I’m revisiting in a couple of days; Yalla Yalla – an excellent little Lebanese eaterie in Soho; L’Anima - a modern Italian restaurant; Pearl Liang – one of my favourite Chinese restaurants and St Helena – a rare meal outside London!
At home in the kitchen, it was also a busy month. In a response to food writer Celia Brooks Brown’s tweet for recipe testers, I volunteered to test three of her recipes for her future book New Urban Farmer. As they were all vegetarian, the husband was most satisfied. I also attempted Anna del Conte’s family recipe for spaghetti with Marmite, which was surprisingly delicious, as well as one of my all-time favourite Cantonese dishes, morning glory stir-fried with fermented bean curd.
Finally, I reviewed two books, Fuchsia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper, a fascinating food-related account of her time spent in China with a few recipes, and Jane Lawson’s Snowflakes and Schnapps, a collection of winter recipes from cold European countries.
On top of everything else, the Japan trip in November is still in the process of being researched and planned.
Thank you as always for reading!
I got hungry just thinking about the effort involved to attend the events, prepare the food, visit the restaurants, write up the posts, never mind the wonderful eating. I lived being able to live vicariously through all the posts and look forward to what September has to offer.
OysterCulture – thank you! I’m also wondering what will be happening in September. All good food things, I hope!
I appreciate your monthly re-caps: it gives me a chance to catch up, now that my blogging and blog reading have bogged down a bit. Highlights for me were your Lille trip and the morning glory recipe (which I’ve been eyeing at the farmer’s market; I just have to find the fermented bean curd). Happy September!
Tangled Noodle – thank you! Sometimes I wonder who really reads them, but if you find them useful, that’s good enough reason to continue writing them. I find them useful for myself, in case I can’t remember something I did in a particular month, or I need to find something in a hurry and remember which month I did it in. When I write the annual round-up, these summaries are even more useful!