Wintering

We spent yesterday morning in a travel agent's office off Oxford Circus booking our trip to India next year. The rest of the day was filled with shopping and cooking. We bought Christmas presents from Liberty and Muji. For ourselves we bought kitchen utensils from Pages Catering shop on Shaftesbury Avenue and French kirsch and Polish bison vodka from Gerry's Wines & Spirits on Old Compton Street in Soho. We also treated ourselves to a couple of cookbooks from Borders: Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries: A Year In The Kitchen and Silvena Rowe's Feasts: Food For Sharing From Central and Eastern Europe.

Before I met M, I had little exposure to Central and Eastern European or even Jewish cooking - surprisingly, since I had always loved Mediterrean and Middle Eastern food, and since my father, who had spent time in Germany as a young man, used to cook sauerkraut for me as a child. But M's grandfather's family was Jewish and from the Ukraine region and his Jewish grandmother's side was Polish, and M has an acute love of Jewish and Central/Eastern European food.

Sour cherries, smoked fish, wild mushrooms, sweet quince, figs, pomegranates, poppy seeds, pearl barley, lentils, beetroot, gherkins, walnuts, coriander seeds, caraway, cumin; beef goulash, chicken Kiev, braised lamb, stuffed dolmeh, moreish pierogi... The ingredients can all be found on our doorstep on Green Lanes in Harringay. Shops specialising in Iranian, Greek, Turkish and Polish food abound here. We're very lucky.

When we returned home, M made Rowe's classic beef Stoganoff and served it with peas and grilled balls of mashed potatoes. He seared a pound of beef fillet strips in a little butter for a couple of minutes, then added a diced medium onion, salt and pepper and fried for a few more minutes before setting aside. Then he added more butter to the heavy Le Creuset saucepan and sauted 400g diced brown mushrooms for 5 minutes. He returned the beef and onion mixture to the pan, sprinkled it with a tablespoon of cornflower and a teaspoon of English mustard and stirred well. He continued to stir whilst he added 200ml of beef stock (made with 2 Oxo beef cubes). He popped the lid on and let it simmer. After 20 minutes, he stirred in 125ml of sour cream and let the mixture cook on a low heat for another 10 minutes. Before serving, he sprinkled in 2 tablespoons of finely chopped fresh parsley.

It's not been all eating chez Planethalder. I've been feasting on books too. I finished the brilliant Chinese novel The Uninvited and have since been engrossed in Hanif Kureishi's portrayal of a man's infidelity and the breakdown of his marriage.

"It is the saddest night," Kureishi's protagonist begins in Intimacy, "For I am leaving and not coming back. Tomorrow morning, when the woman I have lived with for six years has gone to work on her bicycle, and our children have been taken to the park with their ball, I will pack some things into a suitcase, slip out of my house hoping that no one will see me, and take the tube to Victor's place."

Clear eyed and unsentimental stuff.

It's Sunday now, and the sun is streaming in through the kitchen window. Our windows are steamed up - a sure sign it is chilly outside. We've eaten toasted bagels with cream cheese and raspberry jam and drunk several mugs of coffee. M is now at the gym, but I don't feel guilty because I went to the gym all of last week at work. So I've moved the laptop onto the kitchen table and am writing and surfing in between flicking through magazines and Nigel Slater's cooking diary.

M will call me when he's on his way home and I will meet him at our local Polish grocery store to pick up pickled herrings with red and green peppercorns, beetroot caviar, gherkins in brine and black rye bread for our lunch. We'll also pick up a chicken from Baldwin's as we plan on cooking roast chicken for dinner tonight, stuffed with chunky bulgur wheat mixed with lemon zest, raisins, pine nuts and parsley. But before dinner we will go to Hampstead and re-visit our wedding venue to check it out once more to get a better idea on the lighting and decorations we'll need for next February and where the musicians will perform.

Though we are out and about, and though we are both busy at work and planning our wedding, we're generally visiting less museums, art galleries and theatres than usual. Winter is a time for hibernating, for cosying up inside in the warmth, for turning in early and sleeping in late. Winter is for cooking and eating, for curling up on the sofa and chatting, for reading snuggled up inside a duvet, for watching trashy American dramas or Asian horror films on DVD, for shopping and treating ourselves, for dreaming and reflecting and appreciating what we have right now rather than what we don't have. I haven't made new year resolutions for years. I never resolve to do new things until the first shoots of Spring appear around March. Only then am I ready for the new. Until then, and a February wedding notwithstanding, these are the days for standing still and wintering.

Turks and Nautch girls

My first encounter with Harringay was four years ago when I visited the house of my two close friends Dg and J. The borough did not make a good first impression. I can be quite judgmental at the best of times, but fortunately age and experience has taught me the futility in relying on first instincts. Some of my closest friends, for example, were people I took an instant dislike or ambivalence to when I first met them. My first thought about Harringay was, "What a dump". Now it's proven to be the best place I've ever lived in in London.

The most established ethnic community in Harringay is Turkish, originally Turkish Cypriots fleeing the Turkish-Greek conflict over Cyprus. Greek Cypriots also arrived in the same part of London and more recent arrivals have been Kurdish and Kosovan refugees, as well as some Albanians and Bulgarians. The result is Green Lanes teaming with a spectacular array of Turkish, Kurdish and some Greek Cypriot groceries, cafes and restaurants selling everything from cheap kitchen towels, plastic clothes lines and mouse traps to heavenly baklava, meaty lamb and chicken kebabs and fresh herbs and spices sold by the fistful. The ornate and imposing Salisbury pub features poetry and music nights and is testimony to the growing number young professionals priced out of trendy neighbouring Crouch End and students moving into the area, though we've never drunk in it.

Shamuss Abbas, on the strip of Green Lanes' shops nicknamed Grand Parade (established in 1899), is our local grocery store where we regularly stock up on feta cheese, honey, salamis, flat breads, yoghurts, parsley and fruits on the way home from work. Antepliler is our local Turkish restaurant, much mentioned in this blog, where we eat succulent, marinated and spiced lamb or chicken kebabs on those weeknights when we can't be bothered to cook.

Yesterday morning, M went out to pick up our drycleaning from Zephyr and to get his hair cut in Chris's Of London (as if "Chris" needs to distinguish himself from all the other Chris's barbers across the country!) down the road, before popping into the best Turkish bakery in London - Yasir Halim - to buy freshly baked croissants, lamb kibbe and spinach and feta cheese boreks for our breakfast and lunch. I stayed in the flat and uploaded a backlog of photos to my Flickr account. We ate over the weekend FT and I continued to surf online as M read and played the new Tekken on his PSP and Total Overdose on the PS2.

The day was grey and cold, but eventually around three o'clock, we roused ourselves from the snug warmth of our flat to jump on a succession of trains to Kilburn where we saw the Indian movie The Journey, or Yatra, at the Tricycle Cinema as part of the London Film Festival. Directed by Goutam Ghose and featuring my childhood Bollywood heroine, the ageless Rekha (if I ever have a daughter I will name her Rekha), the movie proved to be a slow and ponderous meditation of memory and fiction and an exploration of the alleged transition of Indian culture from the spiritual to the materialistic. It's not a film I will watch again, but once again it was wonderful being surrounded by so many Indians.

It was also fascinating to learn more about India's nautch girl tradition. According to Pran Nevile's book Nautch Girls of India: Dancers. Singers, Playmates,

"The Nautch girl as an entertainer of men belonged to a unique class of courtesans who played a significant role in the social and cultural life of India in the 18th and 19th centuries. She represented a delightful synthesis of different cultures and dance forms the classical and the popular. The Nautch girl was no ordinary woman of pleasure. She had refined manners, a ready wit and poetry in her blood. She catered to the tastes of the elite who had the time, resources and aptitude to enjoy her company. Her sexual favours were reserved for the chosen few. Over the centuries, she appeared in various incarnations, but chiefly as a temple dancer dedicated to the gods, for dance is believed to have divine sanction."

In The Journey, the aging nautch girl (Rekha) was a very contemporary incarnation delivering, in return for money, entrancing kathak dancing and classical singing along with sexual favours.

Afterwards, we walked down Willesden Lane for solid local Keralan cooking at Kovalam, where we ate spicy uzhunnu vada with sambar and Mysore bhonda for starters. We had main dishes of coconut-drenched and creamy lamb malabar, pan-fried pomfret fish curry, and a beetroot thoran encrusted with dried coconut and black mustard seeds. We shared a dessert of creamy vermicelli milk pudding with sago seeds, cashew nuts and sultanas. Not as spectacular as the Rasa or Masala Zone chains of South Indian food, or the Ravi Shankar on Drummond Street, but a lovely cap on a lovely day nonetheless.