The National Portrait Gallery: A Quick Review

One of the benefits of being a university student, not a high school teacher: I have a month off for winter break. One of the unfortunate factors of being a university student, not a high school teacher: I am to use this break to write a 20-page paper.

One of the benefits of being a university student in London: I get to do my research for said paper at the National Portrait Gallery. One of the unfortunate factors of being a university student in London: so far, I got nothing.

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Last Thursday night, when our moms had boarded their plane on the way here and Joe was out with some friends, I headed down to Leicester Square on the tube to visit the National Portrait Gallery. I am writing a paper on the evolution of self-portraits into selfies (yup, for my master's in English), and many of the books I've been using for research were published by the gallery and its curators. I thought an in-person visit was in order (and would pass the plane-ride hours a bit easier).

I went to the gallery in search of self-portraits and to "have a wander," as the British would say. Instead, I was genuinely moved by the experience. I went on a Thursday evening when the gallery is open late (until 9 pm). The permanent exhibits are free, but the special exhibitions cost a few pounds. There were plenty of visitors about, but it didn't feel crowded at all. The gallery is small enough to manage in a couple hours, which is one of the reasons I liked it so much. (The same is not true for so many museums in London.)

Even though I came in looking for portraits that fulfilled a narrow definition, I turned the corner several times and had to catch my breath. Like when I found this:

Sorry for the blurry picture. 

Portraits of Shakespeare. And Mary Shelley. And Thomas Paine. And George Washington. And Jane Austen. I welled up (which was VERY unexpected). 

A detailed statue of Victoria & Albert

Anyone with a free evening or a couple hours to spare, visit the National Portrait Gallery!

Jamie Oliver Beef Stew

Our moms are on their way here and arrive tomorrow and it's hard to say who's more excited - me or them. To celebrate their first night in London, I wanted to make something comforting, wintry, and undeniably home-cooked. 

When we first started getting our veg boxes, I found this recipe for beef stew by Jamie Oliver. It's a somewhat unusual stew, including ingredients like sage and squash and parsnips that my mom never put into her stews at home, but I have fallen in love with it. First of all, stewing beef means I can't mess it up and it comes out melt-in-your-mouth tender no matter what I do to it. In fact, Jamie Oliver specifically recommends throwing the beef in raw and NOT browning it beforehand. Secondly, this stew is easy to re-heat on the stove top and actually tastes better the second time once some of the vegetables have broken down and melded into a thick, flavorful sauce. (Which explains why I'm making it tonight for their arrival tomorrow...) I am really excited to share this one with my favorite home cook!

an old ingredients picture

Ingredients

• olive oil

• 1 knob butter 

• 1 onion, peeled and chopped

• 1 handful fresh sage leaves 

• 800 g quality stewing steak or beef skirt, cut into 5cm pieces

• sea salt

• freshly ground black pepper

• flour, to dust

• 2 parsnips, peeled and quartered

• 4 carrots, peeled and halved

• ½ butternut squash, halved, deseeded and roughly diced

• 1 handful Jerusalem artichokes, peeled and halved, optional (these will eventually come in an Abel & Cole box. Until then, I will wait to try them out.)

• 500 g small potatoes

• 2 tablespoons tomato purée

• ½ bottle red wine

• 285 ml organic beef or vegetable stock

• finely grated zest of 1 lemon

• 1 handful rosemary, leaves picked

• 1 2/3/4 clove garlic, peeled and finely chopped

a new ingredients picture (I had butternut squash already cut up from my throw-everything-in pork stew)

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 160ºC/300ºF/gas 2. 
2. (The missing step in every recipe - spend a LONG time cutting all of the vegetables.) 

   

   really missing pre-cut butternut squash from Costco

   
   

   

   I had some mushrooms this time so I threw those in too

   
   
   
   
   
3. Put a little oil and your knob of butter (such a British term - I usually use about a tablespoon or less) into an appropriately sized pot or casserole pan (you mean my Dutch oven that I use for everything including as a mixing bowl and for salads?). Add your onion and all the sage leaves and fry for 3 or 4 minutes. 
   
4. Toss the meat in a little seasoned flour (since this direction is so abstract, I chose to add fresh pepper, dried garlic, and a touch of cinnamon to it), then add it to the pan with all the vegetables, the tomato purée, wine and stock, and gently stir together. 
   
5. Season generously with freshly ground black pepper and just a little salt. (I also put about 3/4 of the garlic in at this point.) Bring to the boil, place a lid on top, then cook in the preheated oven until the meat is tender. Sometimes this takes 3 hours, sometimes 4 – it depends on what cut of meat you're using and how fresh it is. The only way to test is to mash up a piece of meat and if it falls apart easily it's ready. Once it's cooked, you can turn the oven down to about 110°C/225°F/gas ¼ and just hold it there until you're ready to eat. 
   

According to Jamie Oliver: The best way to serve this is by ladling big spoonfuls into bowls, accompanied by a glass of French red wine and some really fresh, warmed bread. Mix the lemon zest, chopped rosemary and garlic together and sprinkle over the stew before eating. Just the smallest amount will make a world of difference – as soon as it hits the hot stew it will release an amazing fragrance.

An old pic of re-heated stew. It may not look it, but it's delicious!

So excited for tomorrow!!

Holiday Card Fun

One of my favorite parts of the holiday season is sending and receiving Christmas cards. This shouldn't come as a surprise since holiday cards encompass so many of the things I love in life: photos, stationary, design, color schemes, and getting mail. This year, Joe and I have an abundance of photo opportunities to choose from and I would probably try to fit all of them onto one 5x7 flat card if it weren't for the fact that we're not actually printing or sending cards this year. Let's be honest, international postage is expensive and the internet is awesome. So instead I get to make lots of versions of our 2013 holiday message and send it to way more people! Win win!

Vote for your favorite card below by leaving a comment! 

Option #1: A year in review. Pics from several big events

Option #2: photo from our wedding on July 13 in Aliso Viejo, CA

Option #3: photo from our honeymoon cruise in August

Option #4: photo from Prague, Czech Republic in September

Option #5: photo from our trip to Dublin, Ireland in November

Option #6: photo from our trip to Paris, France in December

Option #7: photo from wedding 2 on August 10 in San Diego, CA

I love Paris (in the fall)

December 9 - 13

Our location in London affords us many opportunities for travel. It's an easy jumping off point for nearly anywhere in Europe and boasts five airports, a few major rail stations, and a ship harbor nearby so that you can choose your mode of transport as well as your destination. Joe and I knew from the beginning that we not only wanted to take the Eurostar under-channel train to neighboring Paris, but that we wanted to do it in multiple seasons. The French capital is only a bit over two hours away via this high-speed rail journey and St. Pancras station is only one bus from our apartment - much closer than getting to Heathrow or any of the other airports. It was a surprise, though, how quickly December snuck up on us. Suddenly autumn is almost over, our moms are about to arrive from the States, and our window of opportunity for Paris in the fall/winter was losing daylight. If we were going to go, we had to do it now.

That's how it happened that we booked our citybreak to Paris only five days before departure. I won't say that this plan was ideal - we had to pay a pretty penny for booking the Eurostar less than a week in advance and our hotel wasn't exactly a steal - but oh, was it worth it.

This trip was shorter than our norm (three nights instead of four), so location was key. Check this out:

The marker at 12 o'clock is our hotel, the Hotel Louvre Montana, the other two are the Louvre Museum and the Musee d'Orsay. Not bad for proximity to sites.

Joe was sick most of last week and is still dealing with the remains of a cold. It was a risk, but we decided to go ahead with the city bike tour on our first day. Fat Tire Bike Tours, if you remember from Berlin, has a "Junkies Program" which rewards travelers who take the tours in Berlin, Paris, London, and Barcelona with a free Fat Tire t-shirt and infinite bragging rights. Since we are living in one of the cities and already planned to visit the others, we have taken on the challenge. Plus Fat Tire guides are awesome, their bikes are the most comfortable around, and we love bike tours anyway (see Boston, Helsinki, Berlin).

The tour met at the base of the Eiffel Tower, probably the easiest landmark in the city. As a disclaimer, I am not always a fan of capital cities in general. They tend to be dirtier, more crowded, and more filled with tourists/tourist-traps than other parts of a country. While Rome may steal the hearts of many, I find myself largely unmoved. I enjoyed Madrid more the second time around, but it still falls toward the bottom of my favorite spots in Spain. Paris is a different story. What I remember from my visit in 2007 (it was late in a long trip with 16 sixteen-year-olds, so the memories get a bit fuzzy), was how surprised I was by Paris. Not only did I enjoy it more than other capitals, but it didn't have the same grittiness, that overused quality of so many big cities (New York and LA come to mind). I think most visitors expect the metropolises of the world to glitter in real life the way they do in the movies, but in reality these places are often more tired, run down, and layered in grime than expected. Not Paris. Paris is clean. Even in winter, the bareness of the trees didn't detract from the beauty of this city. It would be fair to say that I am captivated by this place.

Joe riding along the Seine

We were incredibly lucky with weather for this time of year (and for the ridiculous fog that descended on London while we were gone). While it was painfully cold for us southern Californians to be outside so much (low 30s mostly), there was no rain, little wind, and pristinely clear, blue skies for most of our trip. The sun was only out for a short while each day and never rose very high in the sky, giving us the disorienting sense that it was always seven in the morning or four in the afternoon. The affect was beautiful, though; I can see why the impressionists were so inspired here in France.

A surprise around a corner; this sight takes my breath away every time.

Sarah riding near the end of the day (believe it or not, it's only about 3 pm here)

Our guide, Andre

Our bike tour traversed the city's major sites and included an overview of its history, particularly focusing on Louis XIV - XVI and Napoleon as these are the leaders under which the city saw the development of many of its architectural landmarks. Not only did this remind Joe and I why we wanted to visit Paris more than once, it tacked several new destinations onto our spring itinerary. In particular, we now want to visit the Rodin museum and Petit Palais in addition to the Fat Tire bike tour of Giverny and Monet's gardens, Maurice Ravel's house-turned-museum, and a second visit to the Musee d'Orsay. We may need a whole week to make it all happen but we're not complaining.

Because we visited so close to Christmas, we took lunch at the Parisian Christmas market along the Champs-Élysées. As this site had been on my list anyway, I was excited to see it both during the day and again on my own that night. Each of the cute cabins housed a shop, some uniquely French, some trite and touristy. I bought and tasted my very first French macarons and Joe enjoyed his first bowl of French onion soup. When the sun went down (at all of 5 pm), Joe retired to the room and I strolled the length of the Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Tuileries Gardens, enjoying the sparkling lights and offers of fresh nutella crepes and hot mulled wine. 

A typical menu: churros with hot chocolate, waffles, crepes, and hot mulled wine: all the treats that keep you warm in the winter.

Somehow the Christmas market just looked more magical at night.

We will readily admit that we were enthralled and enchanted by the Eiffel Tower. Nearly half of our photos are of or around it and we're already excited to see the way the view changes when we return in spring. I have never been one to "fangirl" about such things, but for whatever reason I've been struck this time and I can't get enough. 

Wednesday morning we had a skip-the-line reservation to take the lifts to the top of the tower. Normally we'd scoff at taking an elevator when there are perfectly good stairs to climb, but I am so glad we booked the "easy way" this time; Joe's stamina was not up to his usual because of his cold and I managed to injure my knee somehow during our bike ride making stairs suddenly seem like a cruel and unusual torture. 

As anyone who follows this blog (or my instagram) knows, #welikehighplaces and Joe and I will go out of our way for an elevated view of the cities we visit. The view from the Eiffel Tower is exactly why we seek out these experiences. 

Can you see the shadow of the tower (even though it was noon)? Can you find the Arc de Triomphe? What about the line of black smog hovering over the city?

It was particularly hazy looking out on the city, blanketing everything in a white film that was hard to penetrate with eye or camera.

Follow me to the Eiffel Tower (again). I don't know why more people don't approach the landmark from the sides - this park on the southwest side was beautiful, peaceful, and nearly devoid of other tourists.

From there we headed to the Île de la Cité for a visit to Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle. We arrived at the cathedral for the free tour conducted in English, only to skip out on it when the guide decided to give a theology lesson and conversion seminar instead of a historical-architectural tour. 

Christmas time at Notre Dame

We then headed down to the dock below Pont Neuf for a sunset river tour. (We bought these tickets intending to use them to see the city at night on our first evening, instead we waited and I was lulled to sleep by the vibrations of the boat. The tour may have been valuable on the first day, but other than that I wouldn't recommend it.)

gorgeous afternoon light

Our plan had always been to visit the Louvre on Wednesday evening since it is open until 10 pm then. Unfortunately my knees wouldn't have it. We decided that despite the ideal location of our hotel, we would save the Louvre for spring.

Thursday morning we had time for just one more site before heading to the train station. We headed across Tuileries Gardens to the Musée d'Orsay for a visit with the impressionists. (Those visiting Paris take note: each Eurostar ticket is good for a 2-for-1 entry into a museum. Round-trip tickets for two people = FOUR half-priced museusms.)

Me: This is so beautiful even in the winter! I can't wait to see this in the spring!

Joe: F this! It's too cold. No stopping.

Tuileries Garden on the left, the museum on the right

Bert and Charlie loved the museum, too, especially because of this Van Gogh painting in "their colors"

Most of the cities we visit, we leave feeling satisfied that we've seen what we wanted to see and that there is no reason to return, at least any time soon. Paris was all about the second trip and how much we want to return as soon as possible. The entire time, I couldn't help but sing like Meg Ryan in French Kiss: "I love Paris in the springtime. I love Paris in the fall..." Well Paris, until the springtime, we bid you a fond adieu.