Making my day....

Look what I got in the mail today! There's nothing like a care package with treats from home to cheer a girl up, especially when there's robots involved. Thanks, Amy, you're a star!

Another Weeknight Recipe - Surprise Salmon Tacos

Week 2 of the birthday resolution inspired eating healthier and making life easier by organizing and planning meals. Thought I'd share with you another hit recipe adapted from one I found on the cooking light website. If you're like me, you think sweet potatoes are groovy but can never think of anything to do with them other than to mash em up. This a surprisingly easy and delicious way to enjoy them.

To get started mix up the following marinade and drench the salmon in half of it while you chop up the veg.
3 tbsp olive oil
juice from 2 limes
1 tsp chopped garlic (from a jar)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp lemon pepper
Chop up a zucchini (courgette in British), red onion, a peeled sweet potato and a couple of seeded chipotle peppers. My mom sent over a can of chipotles last autumn and I froze what I didn't use the first time in ziploc bags, very convenient. Add all the veg to a bowl and pour the remaining marinade over the mixture and toss well.
Spread the veggies out in a single layer on a baking tray and pop them in the oven at 425 F for 10 minutes and then add the salmon for another 7 to 10 minutes. The salmon is done when it flakes easily with a fork - it shouldn't take long at this temperature and again don't overcook your fish!

Break the salmon up into smaller pieces and add the entire mixture to a pair of warm soft flour tortillas. Top with shredded cabbage, sour cream (creme fraicshe) and cilantro (corriander). Yum.

And for dessert....

Kiwi and Cantaloupe!

Project 52 (4 / 52)

"I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines."
-Henry David Thoreau

Blue Monday

Today has been scientifically calculated to be the most depressing day of the year. A psychologist at the University of Cardiff designed a formula considering factors such as weather conditions, debt levels (did you get your credit card statement from X-mas today too?), time since X-mas, time since failed New Year's resolutions, statistics about domestic arguments and relationship break ups, etc. I'm not sure if I buy it, but what do you think?

Here are some reasons that it might not be.

1) The days are getting longer. It's finally almost light when I leave work at 4:30. Whew.

2)The tenderness of wolves. The book, by Stef Penney. Man, am I in love with this story! I'm listening to it actually, and I can't recommend it enough. It's not the type of thing I would normally pick up. It's a murder mystery set in The Hudson Bay Company, northern Canada in the late 1800's. But it's so much more than that! The character development is extraordinary and the plot twists and turns unexpectedly. It's completely absorbing and compelling and so, so good! Go and get it now!

3) The new Band of Horses CD.

4) Although frogging Anouk was painful and heartbreaking, starting it over again to the first season of the Gilmore Girls on DVD is just about the best thing ever.

5) Going grocery shopping on my own late in the evening. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I usually buy my groceries online or make a painful journey to store on the weekends when everyone else (and their screaming children) decide to shop. I popped in to the Starbucks* to get a delicious Chai latte to enjoy while I was shopping and my i-pod on shuffle played You Will Always Be the Same by Ryan Adams as I took my first sip. It's so true!

*When I lived in Seattle, I avoided Starbucks like it was made out of brussel's sprouts and rolled my eyes and scoffed when anyone mentioned the name. There were just so many other options in that coffee slinging city. I now rely on Starbuck's to be one of the few things that reminds me *exactly* of home when I get a wave of the homesickness. I learned this first when I was travelling through eastern europe, in the middle of the coldest winter in 50 years, and on my own. We'll discuss the why's of that situation another time. Anyway, I stumbled into a starbucks in Vienna out of desperation one day and lo! They had sugarfree vanilla syrup! And tazo passion tea! And it tasted just like it did at home! I sorta let Starbucks off the hook after that.

A weeknight recipe - 15 minute Tuna Nicoise!

In line with my birthday resolution for planning healthy meals and because I thought it had been a while since I posted a recipe, here's a quickie for the work week: 15 minute Tuna Nicoise.

What you see is what you get, seared tuna served on a bed of green beans with new potatoes and hard boiled eggs and a light balsamic mayonnaise sauce. I usually have hard boiled eggs on hand, because I think they make a great snack or a nice quick breakie on those mornings that I'm running behind. But if you haven't got any, they only take about 10 minutes to make and the trick to an easy peel is to douse them in cold water as soon as you've pulled them off the stove top. I usually just put the whole pan in the sink under the running tap for a minute or so.

First, marinate your tuna in about a tablespoon of olive oil, a teaspoon of coarsely chopped garlic (from a jar!) and freshly ground black pepper to taste. In my family, the waiter always dreads the question - can I offer you fresh ground pepper for your salad? He'll be there the rest of the night.

While the tuna's soaking, start boiling your new potatoes and after a 5 minute head start you can add the green beans to the same pot. While things are boiling, mix up your sauce. For two people, I'd use about 2 tablespoons of light mayo, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, a half tablespoon each of fines herbes mix (chevril, chives, tarragon and parsley) and dried dill - even better if you have fresh dill at hand, but the dried stuff is just as good.

Drop a little olive oil in a hot pan on medium-high heat and cook the tuna steak for about 2 minutes on each side for medium rare and about 4 minutes each side for well done. Honestly, the trick with fish is not to overcook it. It continues cooking after removed from the heat, so always err on the side of underdone because by the time the plate gets to the table it will cook it's way through. Besides, tuna really is best as sashimi!


When that's finished, lay the beans down first to make a 'bed' for your tuna steak to rest. Accompany with a sliced hard-boiled egg and new potatoes and drizzle the balsamic sauce over everything. Wasn't that easy? And low-fat/low-cal? And delicious?

Apologies for the photo quality on this post, but as it's winter and it's England, good quality daylight is hard to come by!

Want to see other recipes from the Queen Bee? Click here or here or here.

Project 52 (3 / 52)

The thing that I always find so fascinating about the English landscape is that every bit of it has been crafted by man. This old tree was probably planted by somebody's grandfather on land that's been intensively farmed for a couple thousand years. There's a Roman road that runs about a mile from here, that was built originally in 43 AD to connect the Northeast of England with the Southwest (from Lincoln to Ilcester in Somerset) and for the first few decades after the Roman invasion of Britain, it marked the Western frontier of the Roman empire. I now drive it to work everyday, past the old Roman town near Chesterton that was inhabited until the 4 th century AD, past the windmill that was built in 1632, and over the more modern feat of engineering, the M40 motorway. I hadn't really thought about it before, but that's two thousand years of history on my 20 minute commute. Amazing.

Hope springs...

The first signs of spring!

Happy Birthday (to me)!

When it comes to New Year's resolutions, I find that I'm always a little late on coming up with anything. I never really give it any thought until someone inevitably asks me on New Year's Eve what I've resolved to do this year. What improvements I'll make, what nasty habits I'll swear off, what I'll vow to do with religious devotion. I usually shrug and think 'oh yeah.... new year's resolutions' with wonder and frankly, at a complete loss as to what to wish for. Instead, I save them for my January birthday, by now I've had a couple of weeks to think things through and the post-holiday depression is usually beginning to wane at this point and my motivation to get out of bed in the morning is slowly returning.

I read in the Guardian around Christmas time that men and women require different strategies in order to keep their resolutions. Men, of course, should write them down, measure themselves against bite-size, but concrete targets that are easily achievable, make charts and graphs following their progress visually, thus encouraging them to continue down the path of improvement. Women, on the other hand, react most strongly to shame and embarrassment. What am I on about? It said that women should tell friends and family about their resolutions and in doing so it should motivate them not to want to suffer the disesteem of failing to follow through with them. Though avoiding embarrassment is the primary incentive here, the support and encouragement offered by others will hopefully be of some benefit as well.

I choose to go down both roads, never being the traditionally feminine type anyhow. I've made some charts and graphs, and now I'm telling all of you about my birthday resolutions.... They're simple really, and rather standard ones. Firstly, there's the getting fit. I've set myself the achievable, petite targets; exercise 3 1/2 hours a week, lose 5lbs a month, plan healthy meals and snacks. Easy peasy. Then there's the financial stability resolution - that's a new one for me. I've made myself a budget (with a little graph!) with an aim to pay off my credit card debt (over the next two years!) and save up for a trip home to Seattle this summer for my friend's wedding. I've never tried this financial responsibility thing before, so fingers crossed that I can avoid the yarn and fabric shop over-indulgence. Finally, there's the be a better friend resolution. I have the worst habit of never replying to text messages, e-mails, phone calls and even scrabulous on facebook. My new mantra will be reply, reply, reply.

And that's that. Happy Birthday!

Project 52 (1 and 2 / 52)

Did you ever see the movie Smoke? The one with Harvey Keitel and Forest Whitaker? I think it's from the early 90's.... There's this bit in it, where an old man takes a photo out the window of his apartment of the Brooklyn street corner down below, at the same time of day, every day, for some 30 years. I always liked this idea of documenting a mundane or ordinary subject and watching how it slowly changes over time and it's been somewhere in the back of my mind ever since. I just never managed to stay in the same place long enough to ever let it come to fruition for me.

Now that I'm settled here in Warwickshire, I thought I'd finally start my own project. I'm not diligent enough for an everyday sort of endeavor, but I think I can just about manage once a week. Here's my subject, this old oak tree in a field down the road from our house. I aim to shoot it at around the same time on the same day every week. I can't wait to see how it turns out at the end of the year....

Here's week one (above) and week two (below) of Project 52. Enjoy!

Mostest Favoritest of 2007

I'm not really much of a list maker. I know some of you out there find no greater pleasure than making long lists of things you've got to do and find particularly great satisfaction in crossing things off of said list. One of my closest friends even includes 'shower' and 'eat breakfast' on her daily to-do list so that she can have the satisfaction of dragging her pen across the page an extra couple of times. My husband is one of these listy types as well, and razzes me relentlessly about making shopping lists and to-do lists and packing lists when we go on trips. I usually manage to make do without one, she says tapping her forehead knowingly with her forefinger.

It's that time of year when everybody starts compiling lists of things that they liked best about the year and though I don't really get the point of to-do lists, I do like making top 5 lists. Anybody who knows me knows that it's music that makes my world go round and I've always sort of fancied myself something a connoisseur of good tunes. You be the judge. Here I'll list my mostest favoritest albums of 2007!

Before we get started with the drum roll and all the hullabaloo, I need to send a couple of honorable mentions out. This was a good year in music for me. Pretty much all of my favorite artists put out new albums, one even posthumously, though regrettably only one makes the final top 5 of 2007. Shocking really, considering I'm the loyal fan type, but damn there was some fine new (to me) music to come out this year!

And the runner's up are ...... Iron & Wine -The Shepherd's Dog (can you believe it, i&w didn't make the top 5!), Wilco - Sky Blue Sky (what? not Wilco either?), Amy Winehouse - Back in Black, Damien Rice - 9, Ray LaMontagne - Till the Sun Turns Black (I know this came out in 2006, but I didn't get hold of it till later and I haven't stopped listening to it since), Kings of Leon - Because of the Times, The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible, Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City and last but certainly not least, Beirut - The Flying Club Cup.

Elliott Smith's New Moon would have made my Top 5 had I not just gotten it for x-mas and have only listened to it a handful of times, but it's absolutely brilliant. Go out and buy it immediately!

5) Coming in at number 5, it's our dear friends Radiohead with their perfectly radiohead sounding album, In Rainbows. Case in point, when my friend came to dinner recently and asked me to put it on, the first thumps of 15 step started off and she proclaimed "Oooh! It sounds just like radiohead!" Also, I'm a big fan of their pay as much as you want downloading scheme. I gave it a good deal of thought, but in the end settled on £3.00 for mine, which seemed fair enough to me. How much did you pay for yours? I read the average paid was £2.99 so as it turns out, I'm perfectly average.

4) Next is Elvis Perkins' pretty little debut album Ash Wednesday. I heard about this thing way before I got around to giving it a listen. I was flying from LA to London on Virgin and I swear that's as good as it gets for transatlanticism. (Oh Virgin airlines... you're so dreamy.) There's all sorts of fun things about a Virgin Atlantic flight, loads of movies, games and music on the little video screen on the seat in front of you and a music magazine to flip through. For some reason this kid's story stuck to me. He's the son of a Hollywood actor who died of AIDS in the 80's, his Mom was killed in 9/11 so there's lots of reasons to expect that this album would be a bit mopey and sad, and it is, but not in the ways that you might expect. It's dreamy and loopy and sometimes a bit poignant and shocking. Swoon.

3) Now, I don't have a whole lot to say about this album except that I listened to it A LOT this year. It's one of those that's completely sing-along-able and for that reason alone, it played while I was cooking or jogging or in the car and in the shower. All I really know about her is that she's Canadian and used to play with Broken Social Scene. Divine!


2) I love everything about Miss Kate Nash. I love the storyteller in her more than anything, I love that she's a teenager, but wouldn't sell her soul to the Britney machine, I love that even though by now you can't get her off the radio in the UK, I'm still not sick to death of her. She came to me by accident. Wilco was playing on Jools Holland, which for the Americans is a late night show on Fridays that showcases all sorts of music and I stayed up late to get some Tweedy action. Instead it was little Kate that grabbed my attention. The only introduction she got was "This is Kate Nash, she's new" and she was only allowed one song. She didn't have an album out or anything yet, but her songs were all over limewire and myspace and the like. I started collecting them as I came across them and if I'm honest, I don't actually own this album, I've only bits and pieced it from the internet. Naughty!

1) Peter, Bjorn and John blew me away this year. I can't stop listening to their album Writer's Block. Here's my favorite song from the record and maybe you'll see why I love it so, so much.


Good stuff. There were a bunch of albums I didn't get to listen to yet like pj harvey and Sigur Ros and Steve Earle and Bat for Lashes and Band of Horses and Caribou and KT Turnstall and Interpol and Rilo Kiley and Spoon and Bettye Lavette....

What are you listening to?

(sorry about all the you tube action, I'm not sure what happened there and can't seem to fix it. besides, you can't have too much of a good thing!)

Happy New Year!

Here's hoping you find plenty of sun spots to curl up in for 2008!!

I know, I'm a little late but I got there in the end! My trip to Berlin was super-fantastische! Note: New Year's Eve in Berlin is probably best experienced from an armored vehicle or perhaps the Pope mobile. It's a friggin war-zone out there. It's not just that there are fireworks in the hands of the masses, but big fireworks, like rockets and M-80's and scary noisy whistling then banging, booming ones. And then they're thrown at you while you're waiting for your ever-efficient-it-takes-more-than teenagers-with-fire-powered-rockets-to- stop-this-German-bus and they're exploding in mail boxes and rubbish bins and phone booths and thrown at every passing car and at each other and at you or otherwise exploding all around you. The Germans didn't seem to blink an eye, it was all in good fun, they said. I, for one, was terrified and I'm not embarrassed to admit how wimpy I am.

And I'll also admit that despite all the noise, I really had a ball on new year's eve and the rest of my trip - Berlin is a fun city to visit and the Big G and me talked a whole lot about how great it would be to live there some day. It was fab to catch up with a dear friend whom I hadn't seen in ages and even more fab to eat Brats and drink delicious, cold beer!! (the UK stuff is always served at room temp, ick!)