a fresh new era for Kris­ten in London!

I’m back!

Did you miss me?  I missed you all.  But there is a good rea­son for my absence, and I’ll tell all now.

Vol­ume Two of “Tonight at 7.30” is being print­ed as we speak!  It’s ter­ri­bly exciting.

You may all remem­ber how cocky I was when “Tonight” was pub­lished.  The book launch was on my 50th birth­day, and I sim­ply sat back and felt smug.  Avery, my pho­tog­ra­ph­er, was an accom­plished adult, my book was fin­ished, my life’s work (both of them) were fin­ished.  I had giv­en birth and the baby was beau­ti­ful.  I rest­ed on my laurels.

For about six min­utes.  Then my desk began pil­ing up with ver­sions of new dish­es I was invent­ing, new books I’d found inspir­ing.  We had moved house to very near to Bor­ough Mar­ket, and read­ers, the choic­es!  The fresh­ness, the authen­tic­i­ty, the peo­ple, were just over­whelm­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and I sim­ply could­n’t resist mak­ing up new recipes to take advan­tage of all the vari­ety and rich­ness around me.  It was tremen­dous fun to talk to the pur­vey­ors of fresh pas­ta, gor­geous meats and fish­es, fruit and veg, bread, all of whom want­ed to know what I was cook­ing that night.  With­out even real­ly think­ing about it, what I still think of as “Vol­ume Two” began to take shape.

Of course, I’d lost my pho­tog­ra­ph­er to the hal­lowed halls of Oxford, and even when she came home to vis­it, nei­ther of us was in the book-pro­duc­tion mind­set.  The whole idea of anoth­er book was just a dream, really.

Writ­ing a book is one of the most chal­leng­ing things I’ve ever tried to do, and one of the pit­falls is pro­cras­ti­na­tion.  Espe­cial­ly when one’s self-pub­lish­ing, the only dead­lines are arti­fi­cial ones one sets for one­self.  (That does­n’t real­ly work for me.). It’s fatal­ly easy to do every­thing else under the sun, right down to iron­ing tea tow­els (a favourite diver­sion I’ve resort­ed to in all the 30 years since I spent a lot of time not writ­ing wrote my dis­ser­ta­tion).  There’s no one offer­ing you mon­ey for your words, so they just stay put in your eas­i­ly-dis­tract­ed *squir­rel* *shiny­ob­ject* head.  It was much eas­i­er for me to com­pile my list of dish­es (1oo or so), and then just sit back and wait for some­thing to hap­pen.  Mean­while, I played around on Face­book (a delight, and instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, and just plain friend­ly), and dab­bled in Insta­gram (my pho­tographs aren’t real­ly good enough), spent a lot of time vol­un­teer­ing with my lit­tle kids at Fri­day after­noon Cook­ing Club…

vol­un­teer­ing with my beloved Home-Start children…

giv­ing love­ly din­ner parties…

trav­el­ling to Red Gate Farm to spend time with beloved fam­i­ly and friends…

work­ing with the bril­liant Guild of Food Writers…

wel­com­ing friends from America…

ring­ing the ever-chal­leng­ing bells at glo­ri­ous Fos­ter Lane…

and vol­un­teer­ing at our beloved no-food-waste char­i­ty at Bor­ough Market.

Life was very busy.

Avery grad­u­at­ed.

She came home after uni­ver­si­ty and set­tled in to a full-time job, and then to grad­u­ate school.  We agreed in a lazy way that she was will­ing to be hired to take the pho­tographs for what I was begin­ning to think of as “Vol­ume Two,” and came to a fee.  And that was that.  She was nev­er home dur­ing the day to take a pic­ture, and like as not was out at night.  My new recipes lived in a Word doc­u­ment, and on the pages of social media, wait­ing for me to take prop­er notice of them.

And then, out of nowhere, the pan­dem­ic struck, and every­thing stopped.

Like every­one else in the world, we were told to stay home.  We had Avery and her Martha here with us, the four of us try­ing to live and work in one big room — our office, din­ing room, kitchen, tele­vi­sion room — and not dri­ve one anoth­er crazy.  We shared hun­dreds of lunch­es togeth­er, gath­ered around the tel­ly watch­ing “Uni­ver­si­ty Chal­lenge,” and just as many din­ners, often cook­ing togeth­er, at least two of the four of us, shar­ing recipes, exper­i­ment­ing.  Thank­ful­ly, the days were length­en­ing in March and April, so we weren’t stuck look­ing at mourn­ful grey skies begin­ning around 3:30, as so much Lon­don win­ter is.  The evenings were beautiful.

Then a com­plete­ly new top­ic was intro­duced into our fam­i­ly: the girls had decid­ed to move out.  Out! To their own flat.  Unbe­liev­able.  John and I dis­cussed this weighty mat­ter on many, many after­noon walks on our one allowed trip per day out of the house, for exer­cise.  Our four­some was to be bro­ken up.  We had such mixed feel­ings.  Pride that the girls had saved enough mon­ey to afford their own place, excite­ment to see what it was like, nos­tal­gia at all the good times we had had togeth­er, a tiny spark of relief that the rather crowd­ed flat would open up a bit.

And, along with all these rumi­na­tions, we had a DEAD­LINE.  For the new book!

“Once you move out in Sep­tem­ber,” I rea­soned, “there will be vir­tu­al­ly no more chances for you to take the pho­tographs, will you?  Let’s make a list of all the recipes we real­ly want to be illus­trat­ed with a pho­to of the fin­ished dish.”  Our feel­ing was that some of the recipes for Vol­ume Two could be illus­trat­ed with pic­tures of peo­ple, or ingre­di­ents, or places, and John and I were allowed to take those, though Avery would edit them.

Thus began the Great Recipe Pho­to­graph Marathon.  I actu­al­ly count­ed up, and for 39 days in a row I cooked some­thing dif­fer­ent for din­ner, and often for lunch, too.  Avery was kept very busy!  It was thrilling to watch her work her mag­ic on all my new dish­es.  Lob­ster grilled cheese made it onto the cov­er of the book, and the sto­ry that goes with the pho­to­graph is so funny.

One of the foods we miss dur­ing Lon­don sum­mer is lob­ster. These live­ly crus­taceans are absolute­ly one of my favourite treats, and dur­ing sum­mers in Con­necti­cut when it’s cheap­er than good chick­en, it’s not even a treat!  We eat a lot of it.  I can nev­er fin­ish the tail, and it ends up in a lob­ster roll, or even, dare I say it, a lob­ster grilled cheese, rich with spicy mayo and spring onions.  Ooh, I can taste it now.  But I can’t, because here in Lon­don lob­ster will set you back close to $70 a kilo, if you can imagine.

There is a very large chain of sand­wich shops here in Lon­don, “Pret a Manger” (with­out an accent, of course), who offer sea­son­al delights like Christ­mas sand­wich­es, and dur­ing the pan­dem­ic sum­mer there appeared a “lob­ster roll” on their menu, for a very lim­it­ed time.  For a sur­pris­ing­ly rea­son­able amount of mon­ey.  It was but the work of a moment for John to run to Pret, pick up four lob­ster rolls, and for me to painstak­ing­ly har­vest all the lob­ster chunks from them, and pile them with cheese onto my own home­made sour­dough, slathered with spicy mayo and spring onions!  The pho­to­graph turned out, as you can see, absolute­ly mouthwatering.

Avery worked like a demon to meet the Sep­tem­ber 6 dead­line of their move away.  Yuzu and cham­pagne sorbet…

Kore­an feast…

Egg sal­ad on my home­made sour­dough rye.

Cheese scones.

So many delights.

We spent one hilar­i­ous day going through all our books and decid­ing what copy of what Avery would take with her.

And then they were off, in a flur­ry of box­es and bags, one fine Sep­tem­ber day, and we helped to set­tle them in.

Dur­ing that brief, hal­cy­on peri­od before the sec­ond lock­down, we enjoyed spend­ing time with them in their new place, cel­e­brat­ing their freedom.

I embarked on the mon­u­men­tal task of edit­ing the text.  More on that in my next post — you’ll be so glad I DID edit the thing, and sev­er­al oth­er peo­ple did too, because boy, did we find some clunkers!

It’s good to be back with my beloved blog, and with you all.  Com­ing soon — an offi­cial announce­ment of the title of the new book… it’s real­ly happening.