Preparing for Sunday Roast in London

 We'll be going to London at the beginning of January and our first day there will be Sunday, so of course we'll need a Sunday roast.  We arrive early that morning (6:30 am) so have plenty of time to get ready.  Unfortunately Juan, Mandy and Louise don't land until 11 but we're hoping we can get to the Sunday Roast by 3 so the restaurant doesn't run out of lamb, like it did when we were there with Penny in 2018.  Americans think of Sunday dinner but in England it is Sunday lunch, and TimeOut says it is "An elemental meal, one that Londoners take incredibly seriously".

Whippet Inn Garden Space

Juan had made reservations at Blacklock but they notified him recently that they weren't doing Sunday Roast on New Year's Eve (probably preparing for a big bash instead...).  Now we're doing Sunday Roast at at a pub more local to the Kensal Rise AirBnB:  The Whippet Inn.  It offers "modern seasonal food, complimented by an excellent range of local and continental craft beer" (good!  I'll be able to get a Belgian ale) and it has a heated, all-weather garden space.  Below is their sample roasts menu:

R O A S T S

All our roasts are served with roast potatoes, glazed carrots, seasonal greens, a Yorkshire pudding & gravy.
Full Whippet Roast – trio of beef, pork, chicken with pork stuffing 23.5
Slow Roasted Lamb Shoulder (serves 2) 52

Roast Hampshire rolled pork belly, apple sauce 17.5

Roast Hereford rump of beef, horseradish 20

Roast chicken, pork stuffing Pumpkin & Chestnut 18.5
Pumpkin & Chestnut Wellington (v / vg on request) 17.5

Their dessert menu includes panna cotta, sticky toffee pudding and mango sorbet.  What's not to like!

In the meantime I'm perusing TimeOut London's article on The best Sunday roasts in London to find a spot for our second Sunday in London and to know what to look for that is typically British.  So far I have discovered that most Sunday Roasts are in pubs.  Pubs typically don't open till noon so they have all morning to prepare, in other words don't try to find an English Breakfast at a pub...  However, the Whippet Inn does have a Saturday Brunch (11-4) with a Full English (sausage, eggs, bacon, baked beans, mushroom, roasted tomato, hash browns, black pudding) and a Full vegetarian (sausage, eggs, spinach, baked beans, mushroom, roasted tomato, hash browns).  But I digress.

I also see that Honey-Glazed Carrots and Cauliflower Cheese are standard vegetable sides on pub menus and that these days there's almost always a vegetarian option.  In fact there is one pub that is completely vegan:  The Black Heart.  And yes, they do a Sunday Roast.

So many pubs and so many Sunday Roasts to choose from!

What happens in 50 years

I should never leave posts in draft mode but publish them, come what may.

Here's one from September, writing about the places we lived in Bogotá.  By now we have been there and back but were only able to search out the Carrera 38 #24-59 address between the Universidad Nacional and Centro Nariño.

(September posting)

Today I finally hauled out my old letters from Colombia to Susan, Fernando and Mother and Daddy (which they so considerately took the effort of saving for me) so that I could identify where we lived in Medellin and Bogota in the 1970s.  And here are those 3 addresses:

Calle 30A #81-137, Medellin

Calle 1 #71d-52, Bogota

Carrera 38 #24-59, Bogota

The only address that is problematic is the Carrera 38 address in Bogota because it looks like they changed number of the cross-street.  I should mention here that the address systems in Bogota and Medellin are supremely logical:  the house number consists of the cross street number followed by the house number.  So the address at Carrera 38 shows you that the cross street is Calle 24.  Calles run east-west, carreras run north-south.  In the street view of that Calle, a lot of the houses have two address plaques, evidently the old and the new.  And of course, the panaderia and the carniceria that were there in the 70s aren’t there now.

The neighborhood that has changed the most is the one in Medellin:  it is no longer residential but appears purely commercial with a huge mall across the street:  Centro Comercial Los Molinos.  When we lived there it had the feeling of a small town but now it is definitely part of an urban metropolis, with Harry’s Pizza in the same block.

San Francisco

 My blogs have really been suffering ever since I traded in my MacBook Air for a MacBook Pro and then spilt rum and coke on it.  The MacBook Pro was supposedly fixed by Apple but when Apple started storing everything on the iCloud, they must have stored the startup disc there to since from then on, the laptop wouldn't start up.  I have an iPad but, without the keyboard. it is not the same, not as handy at the breakfast table because I have to peck instead of typing.  Hence ever since 2019 there's been a dearth of blog posts.  My next iPad is going to have a smart keyboard even if it costs me $300.

That's an introduction to this post on San Francisco, where we're going next, this time with Camila and the boys instead of Penny, who is completely tied up these days with her grandson Kairo and, I imagine, enjoying every minute of it.  When we last went to San Francisco with Penny after Juliana's wedding in June of 2018, we stayed at an AirBnB in the Outer Sunset, which was a nice place but so far out that we couldn't go back to the room to take a postprandial nap.  The AirBnB on Green Street on Russian Hill that we stayed at in 2014 was ideal, a really perfect location next to the Cable Car line.  Unfortunately it hasn't been on the AirBnB market for years, which is why we ended up in the Outer Sunset the last time.  This time it looks like we'll be doing a Fisherman's Wharf hotel, which, although not ideal, will let us easily take the bus or cable car downtown and is also pretty close to Susan and Rich's apartment.  Alas, we won't be able to cook although we still will be hitting the Ferry Building's Farmers' Market:  we can always pick up fruit and bread, things for snacks.

There's a Trader Joe's and a Safeway a few blocks away from these Fisherman's Wharf hotels so we can make ourselves sandwiches for dinner along with cherub tomatoes and mini-cucumbers.  Or we can stop at one of the Italian delicatessens and pick up a capicola and cheese, although I bet it won't have French fries and coleslaw on it, much less a fried egg.  Or we could take the boys to In-N-Out Burger at Fisherman's Wharf, if the line isn't too long, or maybe we go there for a late breakfast when it opens at 10:30.  I love how they say their buns use "old-fashioned, slow-rising sponge dough" and their "American cheese is the real thing".  We need to go there just to see if they are any different from Burger King.

We won't be wanting for dessert:   there's a Ben and Jerry's in the neighborhood as well as Italian gelato and pastry down Columbus near Washington Square:  Lush Gelato and Stella Pastry.  Or we can walk down Stockton to Little Swan Bakery Café and pick up some Asian sweet buns and bubble tea.  In 2014 there was a good bakery/pastry shop on Columbus near Green Street that I mentioned in a post as La Boulange.  It was owned by Pascal Rigo a Frenchman who also created the chain of La Boulangerie.  For those of you interested, here is a little history from SF Gate:

"La Boulangerie de San Francisco was founded by Pascal Rigo, the restaurateur who sold his popular La Boulange Bakery to Starbucks in 2012 for $100 million. Starbucks ended up closing all of its La Boulange cafes by the end of 2015, so Rigo reopened six of his locations under a new name: La Boulangerie de San Francisco."

 Darn that Starbucks!!  Now the closest La Boulangerie location is at Pine Street and Fillmore west of Van Ness.  What's the matter with San Francisco?  They got rid of a great gelato place too that we visited on one of our trips but I can't remember the name.