Second Helpings – November 2008 Round-up
Nov 30th, 2008 by admin
The monthly summary for November…
The first half of the month was spent frantically trying to finish the remainder of the Postcards from China. Each day of the China trip has finally been written up as Postcards, outlining not only our eating experiences, but also travel tips, noteworthy places to visit and interesting shops we came across. The 13 Postcards can all be found under Restaurant Reviews – China. I also wrote a summary of my favourite restaurants from the trip for those busy people who don’t have time to read through all the Postcards -A Short Guide To Eating In Hong Kong, Macau & Beijing. And if you only want to look at photos, click here!
Apart from wrapping up the China trip, I paid a couple, well maybe three, visits to newly opened Milan boutique bakery Princi in Soho to try courgette pizza, meatballs with olives and passionfruit cheesecake. There is so much to try, that I’ll have to keep returning. I also had a long-awaited lunch at Australian café Lantana, which I’d love to make my regular haunt, if only they would turn down the music! And I tucked into haddock and chips at my favourite fish and chips restaurant, Golden Hind, where I took some new photos to add to the post.
Learning to make macarons at L’atelier des Chefs with fourteen other food bloggers was certainly one of the highlights of the month. This was a Trusted Places event organised by Niamh from eatlikeagirl, and jolly good fun it was too. It was universally agreed (well in our team at least) that the salted caramel ones were the best! The other highlight was attending the Ferran Adrià talk with Charmaine from tasty treats! (again many food bloggers were there, having bought their tickets months ago). I had planned to write about this, but I’m still reeling from the experience and wouldn’t be able to do justice to the great man with the notes I took. I am sad that I might never get to eat at el Bulli though…
Two recipes from the vegetarian husband deserve a mention – homemade tortelloni with spinach and ricotta and spaghetti with hot smoked salmon and runner beans (not vegetarian, obviously!). Lucky me as I was the guinea pig…
Finally, online London restaurant guide London Eating are featuring my post on Princi in their ‘What the bloggers say’ section, while Chinese community website DimSum has republished my post on What Vegetarian Chinese Food To Order. As we found out in China, this problem does not exist there, but it’s always been difficult finding decent vegetarian food in Chinese restaurants. I’ll be investigating this subject more next year…
Thank you as always for reading!
You really had a wonderful month, Helen – and I enjoyed it vicariously by reading your posts
Loving Annie – thanks! Just back from Ravenna & Bologna, feeling very fat from too much consumption of marvellous food…
Helen Yuet Ling