On smells of home and being cold.

As I am typing this my toes are freezing off. There is something so drastically different about the cold here-- something I have yet to get used to. The days are fine, but considering that is between the hours of 7:30 am and 3:30 pm isn't really saying much. And as soon as the distant sun hastily crawls behind the London skyline the sky seems to break open and begin air conditioning the city. The clarity of the sky is quite endearing, I just wish those winking stars would breathe a little warmth on my sun-rise colored toes.
Good thing cooking at school is such a warm process-- warming not only my skin this week but, alas, my nostalgic heart.
Sea food was the main focus, and boy are there some smells still lingering in my pores that I really wish would stop lingering. This week began with fish (round fish, flat fish, red fish, blue fish)

and ended with shell fish (muscles and oysters and crab, oh my...).

The indescribable smell of cooking muscles always brings me right back to my fathers kitchen (along with the not-so-pleasant smell of gumbo... which would never fail to send our house in to a sort of fumigation mode. Complete with blocking off the whole kitchen in hopes that no odd, imposing, cajun smells would escape and seep into the "new" drapes my mother had been hemming for the past three years.)

The trout we prepared also brought me back to a certain fishing trip my family went on when my sister and I were but wee fishermen. This wasn't because of the way we cooked it, per se-- trout au beurre noisette, although probably one of the best tasting things known to man, is the opposite of anything I ate as a child (I mostly ate t-bone steaks and pre-bagged caesar salad)-- but more in the way we, well, butchered it. 

On that fateful fishing trip my sister and I made the mistake of thinking of the little trout pond as a big fish bowl full of happy little shiny pets. I named mine Pickles (or was it Freckles? I was really into both of those things at the time...) and Olivia, being as enthusiastically creative as she's always been, named hers Silver. After proudly playing with our new, slimy friends--splashing sporadically in their bucket--they were carted off to the "cleaning lady". Things became confusing when the cleaver so cleanly chopped Freckles' head from his scaly body-- leaving him lifeless and, as I cupped the floppy body in my palms, ultimately less fun to play with.

You might be thinking, "Oh, this is when she converted to vegetarianism." but you would be wrong...

Because, as we sat around the campfire later that evening, I learned just how good fresh fish grilled over an open fire can make the food chain taste. 

Now all I need a steaming mug of mulled wine and an electric blanket.

...And some offensively strong perfume.

-H