bottom drawer

What is it about earthquakes and Boxing Day? we all wake up woozy and contented, looking forward to finishing up the left-over food and booze, and suddenly the old whitebeard in the sky feels it necessary to remind us of our piggish self-indulgence by sending a huge natural disaster. Last year I shakily trotted off to our traditional Boxing Day events worrying about my friends in Bam; this year I worry about a very dear friend holidaying in Thailand. Maybe it is timely to remind us, at the time of our greatest consumption, of the fragility of the world we depend on to provide us with our turkeys and crackers and stocking fillers. But it's eqally strange or ironic that the first photo of the disaster I see, on the BBC website , features a South Asian boy climbing over the wreckage, wearing a (fake?) Arsenal football shirt advertising O2, a mobile phone network which no doubt advertises its 'foreign roaming' service heavily. The Arsenal won today, comfortably, but I wonde

Back home to my parentals, the Christmas food thing really gets going. Not only do I not have to lift a finger to be fed fantastic food and delicious wine, but I also don't have to pay for it! Last night I arrived at their house exhausted from shopping and travelling, to be fed roast spatchcocked chicken with paprika and lemon, roast potatoes and homegrown 'rainbow chard', followed by green salad, delicious cheese and homemade membrillo. Then by the log fire, it was lemon verbena tea with Japanese sweets made of chestnut paste stuffed into a candied yuzu. This morning I had buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup, followed barely two hours later (thanks to my excessively lazy getting-up time) by delicate vegetable soup rendered special by home-made chicken stock , and more salad and cheese. With a tea-time snack of more sublime Japanese sweets, it was on to a dinner which began with one of the most perfect dishes one could imagine. One of the restaurants that my father is indir

It's Christmas, again...and the routine repeats itself, with subtle variations, fromthe moment I leave my London flat to go back 'home' to my parents in the countryside. I have too many bags to carry the 15 minute walk to the station, so I get a cab. On the way, I pass two police cars that have stopped and three 'youths' thrust against the wall under a garish stret light, being questioned under the benevolent gaze of a police horse wearing red reindeer antlers. The train is really packed. My father, meeting me at the station, has a cold. I'm exhausted by last minute shopping and the travelling, and go to bed immediately after supper. Today, as is our tradition, we decorate the house, going to get our Christmas tree from the same old farm where we have the same conversation about the virtues of buying trees on Christmas Eve that I have had for as long as I can remember. We pace the field, weighing up the pros and cons of various trees and measuring their heigh

The first 'real' meal that I have cooked since returning to the UK (for which the shopping in the previous post was in aid of) came off well and was real fun to do. The joy of cooking for a dinner party when it's not squeezed in to the hour between getting home from work and everyone arriving. Take your time, be organised, set the table, don't forget anything, change your clothes... The menu was as follows: to nibble on as a 'starter' (knowing all my friends to be perpetually late, making them all wait for the latest person before sitting down to eat is not an option), a smoked mackerel 'pate' (cheat's version), sourdough toast, grilled marinated baby squid with grilled skinned peppers and rocket. The cheating 'pate' is an instant version that I happened upon while combing the fridge one day for something tasty and instant and it's actually rather good. You shred smoked mackerel with a fork (discard the skin) and mix with a decent amount

There is a nightmare called trying to shop for food for a dinner party using public transport and my bare hands to carry everything. It's not possible to buy sufficient food for a three course meal for six people and carry it home at one go, unless you make soup or something that relies on a lot of the stuff that bulks it out being on tap (water) or in the store cupboard (pasta and rice). And for me, pasta and rice and soup are just too everyday to be dinner party food. So I struggle around Borough Market simultaneously over-excited at all that stuff available to buy and totally stressing out at the fact that everything will be crushed by the time I get home and why can't they give me my fish in a carrier bag with a handle not a massive clear binbag type thing tied with a big knot. I end up having to take a cab home and still I have to go back because I couldn't manage to buy wine, olive oil, pudding, and various odds and ends the first time round. How do you do it without

Christmas shopping is a nightmare (I know, you all know). Not only am I revolted at the amount of absolutely useless shit there is available to buy, I suffer a complete melt-down of creativity and then, when I finally get an idea, nowhere fucking sells it. The one decent present I managed to buy in Alabama for my mum was typically me in that it was too big to transport back to the UK given my suitcase size, a fact that totally passed me by from the day I bought it until the day I packed my bag. From now on, everything is being done over the internet, and all I will have to do is sit at home drinking tea and answering the doorbell. That way, I might even have time to make something for someone, for a change.

Last night was my Christmas treat with my boyfriend (as if I hadn't been getting enough since I got back into town) at the Wolseley. Everyone knows that it's the best place opened in the last year or so, run by the guys who did the Ivy and the Caprice so well, perfect discreet service, perfect reliable food, the place to be seen, amazing huge old banking hall and Wolsely car showroom decorated with antique black and gold Chinoiserie, etc etc. All this and more: it is also extremely reasonably priced considering its cachet - one would pay similarly for a vastly inferior meal and experience in this town - and being bigger than the previous restaurants, it's also possible to get a table as one of hoi polloi. It's unshowy, sophisticated and glamourous in a perfectly discreet way, and does fabulous dry martinis. I generally have considered the food here to be immensely accomplished but not 'bowl-me-over' standard - a standard which is more than good enough given how

I've managed to eat sushi twice in the last two days. Yesterday was at Feng Sushi in Borough Market, which used to be a regular lunch spot of mine when I worked right above it. I was back visiting my old colleagues and partaking of our traditional spread of vegetable tempura, yellowtail sashimi, edamame, mackerel and salmon. It's all good, reliable stuff, and the staff are lovely, but what I really wanted was my quintessential London sushi experience at Kulu Kulu on Brewer Street, so today a trip down to Piccadilly gave me the perfect excuse to treat myself. One of the great things about conveyor-belt sushi is you feel absolutely happy and normal eating there on your own. Kulu Kulu is typically London in that none of the staff or chefs are actually Japanese. A mix of Vietnamese, Malay, Korean, black British and what looked today to be a Hispanic of some sort turn out fantastic, cheap, fresh sushi and the assorted other items made from the offcuts of the fish, such as tempura of

Autumn's overabundance so wonderfully described by Keats has come late to my tummy. In brief, in chronological order (luckily due to my huge laziness and late rising, I've been on two meals a day): Full English breakfast at Story Deli - beautiful poached eggs, organic bacon, roasted tomatoes, mushrooms, sourdough toast... Hugely decadent 'I cooked this, really' dinner all bought from the Fromagerie at Highbury Barn - fantastic real pesto with de Cecco spaghetti and marinated baby artichokes stirred in, goat cheeses and dry-cured French ham, a perfect tomato salad (the nearest I got to actually cooking was slicing them up, sprinkling them with thyme, salt and pepper and olive oil), moist and caraway-flavoured brown bread. Pints of Pride, accompanied with good old English ranting (the art of passionate debate is one that America lacks). Bacon sandwiches in bed with real English tea, sandwiched with sex. Pints of Pride, accompanied with Arsenal-Portsmouth and shouts of 

Back in London Town, nothing much has changed....five new vintage clothes shops have opened up around my flat, but apart from that everything is much the same. Pubs are very nice things. As is a Sunday spent getting up very late, going for a long walk and watching the football in a pub with friends. At the risk of sounding like an outtake from a Working Title film, I've also braved Christmas shopping in the West End, gotten really soaking wet in the rain, taken an old-fashioned Routemaster bus and worn high heels while sipping champagne. Four months of dirty jeans and muddy boots have really brought out a slightly alarming girlish side to me now I'm back in 'civilisation'. I'm also inevitably struggling with how to describe Alabama to my English friends. It's such a world apart from what they expect America to be. The usual cliches about right-wing Christians, race relations and George W come up again and again and it's hard to explain how they may be on

The eating continues - yesterday with a boozy lunch, evening drinks and dinner. Lunch was on the waterfront at Canary Wharf at the Gaucho Grill - always reliable, slightly decadent due to the ponyskin chairs though unextraordinary this time - but the position, with clouds scudding over the water and shafts of wonderful golden December light, more than makes up for a lack of fireworks in the kitchen. Still, my ribeye was well-chosen, tender, and cooked rare - a treat compared to the invariably well-done and pale steaks in Alabama. I lurched off, slightly tipsy, to have tea with another friend, trying to avoid offers of cake and maintaining an effort at sobriety for a few hours, before heading off to the 20th anniversary drinks at Clarke's , West London institution and still holding the flame for women in the kitchen and up front. Headed up by wonderful women, the restaurant (and now, bakery and shop) continues its great set-menu policy and produces fantastic, classic food. The gath

Back in the big smoke, the eating starts...with the first treat being lunch from Story Deli on Brick Lane - absolutely delicious Spanish tortilla, and pumpkin and roast garlic soup, which was actually only OK, too much cream for my liking. But good coffee (hooray!) and all the accoutrements of the new East End around me - skinny girls in legwarmers, Japanese boys in artful denim, rain dripping down outside. And then in the evening, back to old haunts - St John Bread and Wine , where we managed to squeeze in before the Christmas party crowds turned up for their bookings. Oh, the joy. This place is so well-known that I shouldn't have to add more, but still the fact that there weren't more of us taking in a table which we had to vacate by 8.15 must mean that someone doesn't know. We ate: grilled pilchards (perfect, just the right seasoning and sprinkle of parsley), roasted jerusalem artichoke, watercress and beautifully sweet slow-roast red onion salad, snails in bacon, flash-

It's been all hands on deck this week to finish our foundations...finally, after all the delays. All pretty chaotic but we got it done. Many incidents involving lots of water in our holes, lots of mud that needed to be got out so we could fit our rebar cages in, still having to cut the cages down as we couldn't dig that deep by hand with post-hole-diggers, levelling sonotubes, weird bracing, tangled strings and all the other accoutrements of first time builders. Then the big moment...the concrete truck arrives... ...and the first hole is an inevitable mess, too much water left in it, sploshing cement everywhere, looks of horror from the team. But luckily things improved after some hasty pumping-out of water, which alas had the side-effect of de-levelling some of our sonotubes and tangling some rebar (prompting a lot of 'why didn't we think of that earlier' type remarks) and it was wheelbarrows and shovels all round. Finally, it was all done before sundown,

Yesterday being the Pig Roast it was a round of typical Alabama fare - catfish and BBQ pork. If you are confused, the roasting of a pig is usually done only at the summer Pig Roast, where it is the responsibility of the second year students. After my total immersion, I think I am finally ready for a change from Southern cuisine despite its many virtues, and have started fantasising about going back to London and blowing a lot of money on food. St John...the Wolseley (where my cousin is currently cooking)...salt beef bagels...real coffee and croissants from Monmouth Coffee...free range meat from Borough Market...beautiful fish in Suffolk... The problem is that unless catfish and BBQ are done really well, it's easy to get bored. The freezing conditions yesterday meant that the outdoor catfish lunch was barely even lukewarm and cold hush puppies just ain't my cup of tea. Though, would you believe, in honour of a) the Rural Studio's English director and b) the use of newspaper

After working late and getting up early, it was a long, cold but interesting Pig Roast day. Cars in caravan formation behind the Dually pick-up adorned with the fluttering flags of the USA, UK and Auburn University, we toured each project in turn, where the group presented on site and the visiting Jersey Devils played their traditional role as guest critics. My group presented first, luckily as by the last presentation I was on the verge of falling asleep. With only a short break for a freezing catfish lunch at Mason's Bend, we finally ended at 5pm back in Newbern, for a BBQ supper and bonfire before the main event, our party/art show at Beacon Street. This was lots of fun - I got my bluegrass-playing friends to show up, much to everyone's surprise as they mostly had no idea that I played the fiddle, and we got another bonfire going, and the whole crowd of students, tutors, devils, proud parents and random others drank and danced and chatted around the bonfire with that rel

OK, so this is pure self-publicity but I know I've got readers out there, and so I was wondering if any of you may vaguely like reading about me and the joys of Piggly Wiggly enough to nominate me for Accidental Hedonist's Food Blogging Awards best new blog category (I'm not eligible for any of the others, being new and all that). I know it's horribly egotistical but hey, you know, why not. This whole food thing truly does keep me sane during my total immersion into the West Alabama mud. I rather like the monasticism of only being able to shop at the Pig. It keeps it all fresh and makes simple things very joyful. A well-made risotto, gnocchi, a chance encounter with something seasonal and fresh - combined with the discovery of just how weird American ideas of cooking can be - keeps me happy and alive, nose in the air, scenting out more.

Last night's Christmas party fare offered some perfect examples of American cooking which to me is utterly incomprehensible but to others is, well, a really good idea. Take the shrimp dip, for instance. Apparently this contained lemon Jell-O , as well as two tins of shrimp, tomato sauce, lemon juice, and mayonnaise. I mean, who actually thinks to put Jell-O in a dip? but everyone raved about how good it tasted and what a clever idea, I would have never guessed it had Jell-O in it, my goodness I'm doing that next time. I couldn't bring myself to even taste it after hearing the ingredient list. Shrimp should not be in tins. And sandwiches with jam and ham? I don't understand, I'm sorry.

Time proceeds scarily fast towards the end of the semester. Last night we had our Christmas party, or rather one of the two parties we are having, the other being the end-of-semester pig roast. Last night was our one lecturer dressed up as Santa giving out our 'secret Santa' presents (he usually teaches History and Materials & Methods), soft drinks only of course (unless you bring your own), sausage rolls and crisps (sorry, chips) and general seasonal cheer. It's been mild and we were sitting out on the porch of the Spencer House all evening. Today I got well and truly muddy on site. We had to shovel away all the dirt that came out of our foundation holes when we drilled them. And as there was a lot of rain last night, the pure clay of the soil was now impossible to shovel and unbelievably heavy. We actually realised it was easier not to use the shovels at all and just use our hands. And with several inches of clay stuck to all sides of our boots, it was the true Hal

Another week begins. We managed to persuade (with a little leaning from our tutor) the rest of the group that it really was a good idea to move our house to the least swampy part of the site, so most of the team spent the day putting up new batter boards and strings, while I worked in studio drawing through some design options for a couple of things. It's amazing how long a day can feel when you start out on site at 8am - by the afternoon I was convinced it was Tuesday. This evening Carol and I continued with our preparations for the informal art show and party we're holding at Beacon Street on Saturday after the end-of-term reviews and Pig Roast. Painting, climbing up and down ladders and making things interspersed with drinking wine and chatting - as it should be. It's a good thing that the Rural Studio doesn't really have a late-night work culture - more of an early start ethic - as otherwise, the idea that we could do this in our evenings would be out of the ques

This week's exciting new food is a freezer-full of deermeat that I have been given by Susan, who works at GB's Mercatile Store in Newbern after I asked her why it was impossible to buy venison here although everyone hunts all the time. She gave me two bags of stew meat, a roast, ribs and ground meat for burgers, and wouldn't let me pay for any of it. Apparently she's already got a deer and a half in her freezer, and expects to have a couple more before the end of the season. So tonight I made a casserole with some of the stew meat, onions, carrots, mushrooms and plenty of red wine. It was good, although it could have done with a little more stewing, but we got impatient to eat. I couldn't find any juniper in the Pig or Fullers, which would have been my automatic choice of seasoning, so I put in a couple of bay leaves and a couple of cloves to try and achieve some of the same effect. The cloves were actually a pretty good choice, surprisingly. WIth some cayenne peppe

OK, so I'm not even going to pretend that this is a late entry for Wine Blogging Wednesday , but on one of those random loops through Google I fonud the following link to my lovely father writing on Riesling which was last WBW's theme. And in another shameless plug, I'm going to recommend to you all his fantastic book A Pike in the Basement , recently republished in a beautiful new edition by Eland Books (seems to be only available in this edition in the UK Amazon but here's a link to the US site with used copies of the original available. It's a fantastic Christmas present for anyone interested in food, travel or wine - and because he never sold very many copies, it's unlikely that you'll be duplicating anyone else's present. He writes about travelling worldwide, from sheep farms in Australia to Las Vegas to the Turkey-Iran border, eating and drinking and getting into scrapes along the way. Each chapter ends with a recipe and a recommended wine, and i

This to me is a typically American meal. Not that it was badly cooked or anything, but a casserole with pasta as an accompaniment? especially as the casserole had potatoes in it? It's all wrong, call me traditional. Plus, a beef casserole (or stew, as it was presented to me) should not contain red peppers and green beans along with carrots and potatoes - it's mixed messages. A red pepper and beef stew, with paprika and other Spanish-North African type spices, would be really good. Likewise a northern European root veg and beef hotpot. Green beans (french beans) should never be in a casserole but would be a really nice side vegetable. Plus the whole blue cheese as salad ingredient thing. Luckily my host had thoughtfully set the different salad ingredients in different bowls so I could choose to have it sans the blue cheese. The really good thing at this meal were the candied pecan nuts (also supposedly a salad ingredient). I asked for the recipe. Sauted in butter with brown suga

On a side note, why on earth is it so difficult to get leeks here? Last night when I was preparing the fish stew one of the friends I had over looked at my leeks (brought back from Atlanta) and sighed as deeply as if I had just started chopping up a truffle.

Last night I was definitely glad to have food in the freezer. My mammoth fish-cooking day after going to Atlanta paid off, with a pot of fish stew in the freezer ready to heat up for myself and friends after a very long day's work. With the addition of some fresh leeks and good nutty brown rice, it warmed us up well against the cold that is both inside and outside my house. Simple fish stew seems to be something that no-one knows or thinks to make very much, despite the fact that its economy and ease would make it one of the most useful recipes. Basically the usual base of onions, garlic and some ginger, a little chilli, saffron if you have it, add the fish when the onions are softened, add lots of tomatoes, maybe a finely chopped red pepper (both skinned if you can be bothered), water or stock to cover, some leeks, season and simmer. Nothing very precise or difficult about all that. Any old fish will really do (I used cod cheeks and salmon offcuts) and it's a very satisfying s

Every day on site brings unexpected new developments. Yesterday, the truck that we got in to dig the holes for our foundations became almost fatally sunk in the mud around the site we'd chosen for the house. It may be that we choose to change the site of the house as a result, moving it as close as possible to the hard standing and driveway, so that concrete trucks/diggers/our cars don't turn into permanent installations in Elizabeth's front yard (a teammate's car also got stuck last night just after we'd managed to dig/winch the big truck out). It's really quite extraordinary how soft the soil is, and it's definitely going to get even less fun as the winter gets wetter. But of course the debate about moving the site is a major headache, with the team split. Today, however, was another ridiculously beautiful, clear, mild day, from the morning when we drove to site through mist rising like smoke from the catfish ponds, to the opening ceremony in Perry Lake

Candied yams are a new thing to me. Sitting in a barbeque house in Tuscaloosa among some prize specimens of Americans with bellies larger than the tables they were seated at, I finally had a chance to give them a go. They're pretty good - cinnamon-scented, sweet but pleasingly not too soft. They'd make a really good dessert with some sheep's yogurt to lighten the dish up and mix with the syrupy juices.

Every week the Rural Studio provides us with a communal meal generally followed by a lecture or other event, at which everyone ritually complains about the quality of the food. Although I would never claim that it had any great culinary merits, the food that is cooked up by a local woman is rarely truly inedible and I do find the complaints about it slightly unjustified. It's filling, home-cooked and free and to my omnivorous mouth this makes it perfectly acceptable, especially compared to the institutional food I used to get in England (hall food at college, school dinners) which was wholly disgusting in every way, and generally totally processed. Given my food-related scruples I do find it strange that on this one I'm one of the only people who quite happily fills my plate and scoffs it down. The only thing I can't manage is the horrible American 'salad' that generally also gets served - iceberg lettuce, those weird pre-peeled carrots that look like orange bullets

We are progressing on site slowly but surely. As in, no actual bits of building yet but very meticulously set out batter boards and strings. Digging holes for foundations tomorrow, after which there really is no turning back. Meanwhile half the team has been researching every possible sort of anchor bolt/holddown for our foundations, as well as organising a septic system and various other indoor jobs. The foundations were today's subject of lengthy debate due to a ninth-hour loss of confidence among some team members. The soil around here is fundamentally a bog despite how pretty it may look - soggy, a high water table, sticky and generally liable to shift and sink. Not particularly good for any kind of foundation apart from 18ft piles going down to the bedrock, which certainly aren't within our budget. Luckily, after going round the houses again and consulting everyone else's opinion (all the tutors, fellow students, a local contractor, Johnny Parker, the internet) and con

Well, today we finally made our first marks on our site! The first part of the process: setting out the footprint of the building with stakes and string. No glamorous ceremony, though, just three of us and a very long tape-measure. I was reminded of Chuck Palahniuk's book 'Diary' which I read on the plane to New York, and its description of the rituals and superstitions of housebuilding, reminiscent of what I had previously learnt about ancient Mesopotamia and also Japan. Would the lack of ritual bring bad luck to this building? It certainly felt strangely mundane - no audience, no blessing, no mayor laying the foundation stone. It's an important and exciting thing, building a dwelling, even if it is a small and cheap one.

After the Thanksgiving break, it's back to the proverbial drawing board. We are (although I've been saying this for the last two weeks) going on site any day – or rather, as soon as we can steal the long tape measure and surveying level back from the other teams in order to set out our site. Meanwhile, we discuss all the things of no design significance and major importance to the building process like how to fit the formwork for our foundations into the holes we dig and whether the weather will hold for long enough that the concrete will cure. The second year team have stolen a march on us, which is great as we can go down to their site and see all the things that have gone slightly wrong, hopefully learning from their errors. Meanwhile, we got home tonight to find some kind of animal has been exploring the huge shed we call home. At least, we found its footprints on the countertop and unfortunately also its piss on my housemate's pillow. Possum? Racoon? A search in al

Eating in NYC was certainly wonderful - decadent, expensive, lovely. Actually, it was probably not more of any of those than a good week in normal London life, but coming from a town with, effectively, no restaurants (Mexican/steak/bbq joints not counting) it was culture shock and a treat. We did the whole Thanksgiving turkey thing, which was cooked, bizarrely, by a friend of our hosts who turned out to also be a mutual acquaintance of mine from Suffolk. He apparently owed them a favour, as he turned up clad in a velvet suit, proceeded to prepare the turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and giblet gravy, put the bird in the oven and then, after a couple of glasses of wine, left to have his Thanksgiving meal elsewhere. It all turned out deliciously, and was finished off with pumpkin pie, which our all-English party had to phone-a-friend to find out whether to serve hot or cold. Then lots of coffee and scotch (no Southern bourbon here) and our expat celebration was complete. The most decad

Apologies for lack of posts. The big Thanksgiving travel thing where the whole country decamped to somewhere else involving a really long and tortuous journey, ate turkey and then went home again, also swept me up, decamping to New York for what in Europe we call a 'mini-break'. A big culture shock from Alabama. Things to buy, everywhere, a strange and rather illogical thing after the total lack of consumer luxuries in the Black Belt (apart from big trucks). While it was rather wonderful it did also make me feel slightly queasy, the analogy of a kid in a candy store being more than apt and the consumption (or even availability) of quite that much candy giving me literal stomach pains. Bright lights, big city, we walked in Central Park (easily consumable beauty), ate oysters and Guinness for lunch at Grand Central Station, took a lot of yellow taxis (easily consumable transport), went to the new MoMA (the ultimate art candy store - ooh, look at how many Matisses they've got

Leaving the Black Belt results in an overflow of food-related moments and the spending of slightly absurd sums of money on eating. Travelling via Atlanta to NYC for Thanksgiving, we haven't even had the turkey extraveganza yet and I'm already feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities for eating, and actually slightly nauseated by the overabundance of food - it's all too accessible, too easily bought rather than made oneself with effort and ingenuity making the unexpected out of the mundane. Shops heave with fresh vegetables, exotic herbs, every conceivable ingredient. I eat roasted duckling in a restaurant where every dish contains at least eight or nine elements, not one or two and some clever seasoning. I eat sushi, which I have been craving for the last months, and it's somehow too normal, ordered by phone and delivered to your door. It's a huge treat but I feel slightly ridiculous making such a big deal out of it. We shop with friends for Thanksgiving trimmings i

Another major excitement this week was that a kind soul saw my Amazon wishlist item for a decent kitchen knife, my pining for my Global left back in England getting too much but my finances not really stretching to such an extravegant purchase. You know who you are - thank you very much! It's changed my life (or at least my cooking).

Today was not rainy, but misty - beautiful, driving across the gentle undulations of West Alabama in the frog-jeep. The whole of the Rural Studio was away, apart from last years thesis students who are still working frantically on trying to finish their projects. It's true that many of the projects past and present out here are hugely ambitious- projects that in a 'real' architecture firm would easily take over a year to complete. It's testimony to the energy present here, as well as the refreshing absence of bureaucracy, that group fo four or five totally inexperienced students can themselves build these major projects with their bare hands, in so little time. Later on it was over to Marion for my weekly old-time music jam. Wonderful old songs, and slowly my fingers get used to playing blues scales, blue notes and the squashed sliding thirds and fifths of this old music fusing Irish, Scottish, French, African and English melodies. The modal tunes reminiscent of pip

Today was not rainy, but misty - beautiful, driving across the gentle undulations of West Alabama in the frog-jeep. The whole of the Rural Studio was away, apart from last years thesis students who are still working frantically on trying to finish their projects. It's true that many of the projects past and present out here are hugely ambitious- projects that in a 'real' architecture firm would easily take over a year to complete. It's testimony to the energy present here, as well as the refreshing absence of bureaucracy, that group fo four or five totally inexperienced students can themselves build these major projects with their bare hands, in so little time. Later on it was over to Marion for my weekly old-time music jam. Wonderful old songs, and slowly my fingers get used to playing blues scales, blue notes and the squashed sliding thirds and fifths of this old music fusing Irish, Scottish, French, African and English melodies. The modal tunes reminiscent of pip

Another simple, yet satisfying meal courtesy of my trip to DeKalb. The small things I crave here - like the small, hard, sweet pumpkin which I roasted and made into risotto tonight. The only pumpkins here are the hugely swollen, bright orange ones bred solely for carving into jack'o'lanterns and putting on your doorstep. Pumpkin risotto has to be one of the most quintessential autumn foods - its sweetness and texture and colour, the chunks of pumpkin melting in your mouth and the slight bite of the rice. I make mine with chopped rosemary added at the beginning of the process, sauted along with the onions and garlic. Somehow pumpkin and rosemary go really well together and again, rosemary is a very autumnal taste - warming, fragrant, dark. With a green salad as a contrast to the sweet richness of the risotto, it's a simple meal that does everything I want from a home supper.

It's suddenly got very rainy here. Yesterday, last night and today it poured down, clattering on the tin roof of my warehouse home, in through some holes in the roof, gushing down the street like a river and turning front lawns into swamps. Everyone here thinks that England is rainy, but it's nothing compared to the downpours we have here. It's very annoying as we were hoping to pour our foundations on Monday or Tuesday, but it'll now have to wait until after Thanksgiving. Virtually everyone left on Friday for the holiday, so the Rural Studio is deserted. Touring round with a visiting English friend to show him the sights of West Alabama, we trudged through puddles, red clay sticking to our feet And then the inevitable happened: my poor little frog-jeep got irretrievably stuck in a huge muddy rut out at Perry Lakes Park. And it doesn't have four-wheel drive. So we had to walk the mile and a half to the nearest house and beg to borrow a phone, and call the irrepla

My first brush with the Greensboro police department! for that most American of offenses, the 'open container law'. Which basically means that you must not carry an open container of alcohol in the street or in your vehicle. So a late night, tipsy walk to the gas station to buy toilet paper, of all things, with two of us clutching our cups of bourbon, means that we attract the attention of the one bored copper circling round town. Being English, he blames my American friends for 'letting' me walk around town breaking the law. We look suitably contrite and he gets his small kick from telling us off, sending us on our way with a warning not to walk around town at all. 'Three good-looking gals and you two guys, there's guys round here that might notice you and I'm not sayin' you can't fight, but I'm not sure you two guys could hold off four or five guys'. Like, where on earth is this fear of crime coming from? We are literally two blocks from ho

The seeming lull in cooking activity is deceptive. The most exciting food event of the last two weeks was my visit in Atlanta to the De Kalb Farmers Market , my excuse being to pick up my boyfriend from the airport. It's a strange place. For the English among you, this is nothing like the Borough Markets of the world. It's a huge supermarket, flying in food from all around the world, hidden in a massive anonymous-looking warehouse in an Atlanta suburb. Endless aisles of exotic vegetables, a huge fish and meat section, and shelves stacked high with the trademarks goods of the foodie middle classes - extra-virgin olive oil, couscous, tofu, spices, dried pulses, red wine. And also the mundane - boring red peppers, rather washed-out tomatoes, large white onions. They don't have free-range chicken, only 'farm raised, all natural' which as we all know is a euphemism and if you were in any doubt, the pallid white skin on the beasts betrayed their upbringing. It made me un

We finally, after many long and tortuous arguments, made our decision on for whom and where to build. The lucky recipient of our first house is going to be Elizabeth Phillips who featured in an earlier post. We went round to tell her. Of course, she was very pleased. But boy, this lady has standards. We told her it was going to be a two bedroom house. 'Can't it be three bedrooms?' was her response, despite the fact that she lives alone and no-one ever comes to stay with her, apart from her daughter very occasionally. But despite these quibbles, when we told her that she was going to get a house, her eyes lifted and her beautiful face, still unlined at 86, showed pure relief. She had just been telling us how she was going to have to have a pacemaker fitted next week. She praised the Lord and clasped her hands.

I got the rest of my Amazon test-drive food deliveries yesterday evening, after I'd finished dinner, so tonight was their testing ground. Sadly I got them all a bit late due to the parcel-delivering customs in deepest Alabama. These are that when we are not home (which is all of the delivery hours), the UPS man knows to deliver our parcels to Barnette Furniture down the road from where we sometimes get a phone call or, as last night, the owner dropping by to inform us rather than that little piece of card in the mailbox. All very well but unfortunately this time I was informed rather late and my leg of lamb which I was so looking forward to definitely did not benefit from the wait despite its careful packing in insulative foam, cold gel bags and so forth. Nevertheless, it was still edible, roasted simply, and the real brown rice that I also ordered (good rice being one of my most insistent food rules) was just what I wanted - nutty, crunchy, especially when I accidentally-on-purpos

I still struggle, either here or in my letters and emails to friends, to really describe what the Black Belt of Alabama is like. I think that the longer I am here the more mundane and ordinary I make it sound, when in fact it is so strange, wonderful and worrying in equal measure. I suppose I have got used to G.B's Mercantile Store selling Stage Planks and Fig Newtons and bacon cut to order, and the battered trucks pulled up outside it; the fact that my 'studio' is an old barn clad in rusting steel which is freezing in winter and boiling in summer, and leaks when it rains; that my 'home' is a car repair garage, a huge, naked, abandoned space; that the 'downtown' of Greensboro contains no inhabitants other than the Rural Studio students who live in palatial lofts above shuttered stores; that the local nightlife consists either of the black bar or the white bar, and at the former I do feel uncomfortable; that most people live in second-hand mobile homes and wo

Reading more of 'Let us now praise famous men' is like one sharp intake of breath after another. Not only because of the acuity which Agee brings to bear on what he observes, but because of the precision of his language, the direct, unapologetic, honesty with which he describes his own feelings and the forcefulness with which he does not pull his punches. More brutal yet lyric than any contemporary writing, his prose reminding me alternately of John Clare's tender yet savage descriptions of the English countryside and others like Cobbett or Thomas Paine, interspersed with the naked sensuality of Joyce or parts of early TS Eliot. No doubt Agee knows his influences and his conscious endeavour at a form of truthful realism, harnessing all the powers of language yet not letting them guide his purpose, is painful yet all the more gripping and stark for this pain. And some parts in particular do not age at all. Particularly, reading the section on 'Education', especial

Having my memory jogged by making Nuccia's tomato sauce, and by hearing stories of gnocchi being eaten in London, today I made gnocchi with the left-over mash from last night (another good thing about cooking for one is that there's always plenty of leftovers). Having probably not made these for over a year, I wondered whether I might have forgotten how, but Nuccia's teachings were obviously deeply ingrained because they turned out perfectly, even if I do say so myself. This is one of those recipes that is impossible to give quantities for. Break an egg or two into a pile of mashed potatoes (I made enough for two and used one egg) and mix up gently with a fork. Start gradually folding in flour, keeping a light touch. I couldn't possibly tell you how much flour goes in, except that when you've used enough the dough should be silky and hang together in a ball so that you can knead it very gently by hand. The silky feeling is what you want; too much flour and the doug

Everyone always says how they hate cooking for one. For me cooking a really good meal just for me is one of life's greatest luxuries, as eating in a restaurant by oneself also now is, though the latter used to make me uncomfortable. I am home alone tonight and cooked just for me exactly what I wanted to eat, a proper meal (not just a quick pasta) and sat down and ate it properly with a glass of wine and a glass of water, salt and pepper on the table in front of me, and, in lieu of conversation, a good book to stop me from eating too fast. Once I remember planning for myself a three-course meal because I knew my flatmates were going to be out. Jerusalem artichoke soup as a starter, if I remember right, then lamb chops, and as a dessert I think I had biscotti and poached apricots. It was the greatest treat - not to worry about pleasing everyone's tastes, not to have to have everything done on time or to have to wait for someone who was late for dinner - a sensation of sheer luxur

I bought a great new skillet today, fed up of using the thin-bottomed telfon-coated frying pans that 'came with the property', as they say. In the flea market here you can buy ancient very heavy cast-iron skillets for 10 bucks, already well-used and worn in with decades of frying chicken, bacon, pork chops and beans. This one will definitely push me over the airline weight limit but it's with me for life now. I'm also happy because I've just made a big pan of tomato sauce to put in small containers and freeze, so when I come back starving from studio on a cold night I know I've got something to eat. Again, it's an inherited recipe that my mother learnt from Nuccia, the fantastic chain-smoking cook at Castello di Volpaia , a beautiful estate in Tuscany making wonderful Chianti and probably the best olive oil and wine vinegar. The owners became our friends when my father fell ill there while on a wine-buying trip about 20 years ago, and was nursed back to heal

I've finally (thank you Aunt Min!) got my own copy of 'Let us now praise famous men', the Walker Evans/James Agee classic exposé of the poverty in rural Alabama in the 1930s and written about precisely the area where I now live. It is almost de rigeur to say that nothing has changed here, save the replacement of cotton with catfish. But reading that stark, intensely detailed prose, coloured by the pointed discomfort of Agee's relatively privileged background of which he is acutely self-aware, it still makes me draw breath to read the comparisons. Of course, conditions here are better than they were then - only 3% of houses now lack plumbing - but the gap in living conditions between this area and the rest of the nation is as wide now as it was then - this statistic is five times the national average. 53% of single mothers live in poverty, which means an income of less than $12,000 for a family of two. It is a book that also struggles vividly and unashamedly with the

In need of warming, comforting and tasty food after a hard day's work, I made the above - one of my favorite pasta dishes, and one that falls into the all-important category of 'sauce takes as long to make as pasta takes to cook'. I've streamlined the making of this dish into an extremely efficient process. Chop an onion and plenty of garlic, put in a frying pan with olive oil and a pinch of oregano to soften. Put a couple of bags/big bunches of spinach [this makes enough for 3/4 but the sauce keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days and I've even frozen it before] into the pasta pan with a little water on high heat, steam quickly, then remove and put the pasta water onto boil. Drain a can of chickpeas and rinse. Put the spaghetti in to boil and stir the chickpeas in with the onions. Chop the spinach roughly. At about the time when you are impatient enough to test the pasta, although it quite clearly isn't done yet, add the spinach to the chickpea mixture a

More good breakfast things today - a late one to celebrate finally getting my driving licence here. The Waysider in Tuscaloosa is definitely going to have a return visit. The best biscuits - fluffy and crisp on the outside and my first real grits. They're kinda weird to have with eggs and ham, as they remind me of pudding, but I got used to them by thinking of Japanese rice porridge which is also a savory dish. But the clientele in the Waysider on this Friday around 10.30am was a real pull. Incongruously groomed old ladies meeting for a gossip over their grits, old couples having a double date: the combination of hearty, inelegant food and twin-sets with Southern accents, with a scattering of the check-shirted working men that you would expect to find in such a place. Sort of like a really old-school London chop house, with that East End gentility bordering on roughness - a kind of Lyons Corner House of America. You could imagine having a great date there at a corner table, with a

Hooray!! I'm a fully legal licensed Alabama driver...finally...after the world's easiest driving test. My examiner (who had a fondness for the English Royal Family) actually told me how to do every manoeuvre. 'Now I'd like you to back up straight here, and remember, look out of the back window when you back up, don't rely on your mirrors.' 'Now I'd like you to turn left at the stop sign and remember, a stop sign means come to a complete stop.' No, really? So now the Frog and I are free to roam as we like over Alabama (not that we weren't already, seeing as there are no policemen around here to stop me).

Another great evening yesterday, practising with the Kudzu String Band , clustered round a big woodburning stove in the lakeside pavilion on the farm of one of the members. Staples of the bluegrass/old time music repertoire such as Foggy Mountain Breakdown are now within my grasp, along with some fantastic old modal tunes. After a long and intense day in the studio, it was just what I needed - three hours not thinking about architecture at all.

Eggs in the USA: For the first time here I ordered eggs. How do you want them? I was asked. 'Fried, please' I answered. Blank look. So no-one here talks about fried eggs! and scrambled eggs aren't really scrambled eggs, they're sort-of 'vaguely-stirred-around-while-being-cooked' eggs. And you can't buy free-range eggs anywhere in the Black Belt. I might have to get my own chickens. Though even with the artificially-coloured piggly-wiggly-eggs, last night I did manage to make a pretty good mushroom omelette, all runny in the middle...

What is it about the ribs from Mustang Oil that is so much more glorious than the ribs from any other heart-stopping artery-clogging Southern diner? How soft and melting yet crisp and chewy, not too much sauce, those melt-in-your-mouth layers of fat around the knuckles...And accompanied by the best slaw - fresh, crunchy, easy on the mayo, green with flecks of orange carrot and red cabbage, and those inimitable cajun fries. This is how dream-food tastes. Today we hit Mustang Oil at just the right moment, early on, when the fries have just been cooked in preparation for the lunchtime rush and only a scattering of folk sit at the formica tables. Just after we sat down and started to eat, the place filled up with redneck men in grubby jeans, steel-toed boots and baseball caps, from the local metal fabricating company, the John Deere tractor centre, and a few farms and building sites. This place lives at the edge of glorious and worrying in its perpetuation of the stereotypes of Southern li

I never thought I would ever be such an architect. Remembering that I adamantly told my interviewer at Cambridge that I had not intention of becoming an architect...remembering that I was told I might fail my first year...remembering the first time I tried to draw a construction detail...and how a former colleague of mine asked me curiously 'Did you ever like making models at school?" when I patched another bodged cut in a presentation model... But here I am, finger-wagging at my poor teammates who forget to think about the wall thickness in a model, who don't consider how a window-sill works...where did I get all this from? I thought I still couldn't do this architecture stuff! Architecture, as my interviewer at Cambridge warned, sucks you in. It creeps up on you and before you know it, well you're well and truly nerdish on the matter of window details, paving slabs and concrete finishes. One of my fellow outreach students remarked, coming back from New Orl

Call me slow, but I only just noticed that Amazon has started a new section (currently beta-testing) selling food. It's utterly amazing. Not just dried/smoked/bottled things, but fresh meat, fish and vegetables. And what's more peculiar is that the price of their fresh vegetables, such as onions, tomatoes, pototoes or peppers, are actually cheaper than Piggly Wiggly . Admittedly, this is without the shipping charge, but nevertheless, I'm astounded. I'm not sure whether its wonderful or terrible that I could have vegetables delivered by UPS in 1-2 business days. What's even weirder is that half the stuff is from mainstream brands - Dole lettuce, Green Giant, Birds Eye. Does anyone really buy frozen Bird's Eye peas from Amazon rather than their local grocery store? (unless you live in the middle of Alaska, sure...) Certainly, given my starved-of-produce state here, fresh meat and fish by mail is something I'm definitely going to be trying out - pictures of le

The last couple of days have been pretty good on the food front. Last night I even managed to have two dinners - I'd already cooked and eaten a spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce, when Cara-Mae turned up to bake bread and make herself (and me as it turned out) a sort of cassoulet for supper. And today Cara-Mae and I had a lovely peaceful lunch on the porch of a tiny catfish diner near Mason's Bend - the typical soup from round here (chicken with small broad beans, green beans, corn and a tomato base with a little chilli heat), freshly fried catfish, hush puppies and fries. Catfish when freshly cooked like this is absolutely fantastic despite its ubiquity and simplicity and the hush puppies were fluffy and grainy. We sat and ate, with our sweet tea, while chatting to the owner-cook - a woman by the wonderful name of Willie Pearl, who started the diner in January after deciding to retire from Magnolia, one of the big catfish plants nearby. Before that, she told us she used to cook

My frog-jeep got a lot of action today, under a crisp clear blue sky, exactly how autumn should be. It was warm, too, t-shirt weather despite the chill last night. In the morning we went visiting some RS projects that I still hadn't managed to get time to see, and getting pleasantly semi-lost in the back roads of Hale County along the way. This place can be the most astonishingly beautiful - breathtaking quiet in the woods and gently rolling hollows, and the odd expansive view across a shallow valley. And after lunch it was off to the grounds of Kenan's Mill in Selma, where a small bluegrass festival was taking place, for learning more old-time fiddle tunes and jamming until the sun went down and our fingers got cold. Playing this music with a group of people, even with my meagre skill and lack of knowledge ('You don't know Dixie?' a woman asked in disbelief) makes me smile so much. Picking up the chords and rhythms, especially the old modal tunes, feels like th

Meanwhile, better late than never, here is Butch before and after his fall.

After election night tacos and post-election nothingness, tonight it's back to cooking, thank god. Risotto, one of my most loved foods, though this one has been a long time coming. First, it was impossible to find risotto rice, even in Super Target in Tuscaloosa where they sell that despicable pre-mixed dried rice and mushrooms, but not the rice by itself. After a birthday night conversation with fellow food fascist Frank, the German second year tutor, a packet of very good arborio was dropped in my lap one day in the computer room. Where he got it from I have no idea. Next, stock: it took some time to summon up the courage to buy and cook one of the dubious battery-farmed chickens from Piggly WIggly who swim in their plastic bags in a mixture of blood and water. But I took the plunge and was rewarded by some decent home-made stock. Last, the ingredients to flavour the thing - and I had to fall back on tight button mushrooms which after half an hour of simmering managed to grow som

Life post-election is predictably, yet strangely, normal. Those of my fellow students who voted Kerry (by my estimate about two-thirds) show no visible signs of distress, and those that voted Bush finished gloating quickly. Speaking to Anne Bailey, an admirably liberal white woman, she expresses doubts in hushed tones about Bush's effect on the Supreme Court, but for everyone else it's just another day. It's suddenly got cold today. Beacon Street is chilly, though warmed by a good dinner, a bottle of mediocre red wine and an unexpected indulgence in poetry reading (Keat's Ode to Autumn and William Blake). My hands are covered in paint from helping Johnny Parker paint a fence. The $20,000 house is another step nearer to being on site (hopefully next week). Lou's at lunch today was subdued. We listen to the speeches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on my friend's iPod as we drive into Newbern, and wonder what happened to those heady days. And I've di

OK, so if you're right-leaning it's all over and Kerry should graciosuly concede, if you're a hard-bitten liberal its time to fight for those provisional ballots and absentee votes to be counted properly. Fact is, once again these tactics probably won't manage to unseat a president-elect who has got the greatest proportion of the popular vote in history. We don't want a reversal of Bush/Gore. But to the folks back home whose black despair at having to deal with this moron for another four years has my empathy, keep up the good fight. It makes it all the more important to take positive action on whatever small or great level. And in America, I can't help but feel that the most necessary action is urgently to educate - so this kind of politics becomes unacceptable not just to 'people like us' but to the population at large.

I'm logging off to follow the rest on NPR as I fall asleep. But for my two cents, when I wake up I reckon Kerry will be challenging Ohio in the courts.

The liberal Daily Kos continues to be optimistic even about states like Florida, where apparently 1m absentee votes remain to be counted, and Ohio, where similarly large numbers won't be counted for several days under state law. I can't really allow myself to share his hopes, although how Fox can call Ohio before people have even finished voting I don't know. It's weird enough that they 'call' the states before all the votes have been counted, as they do in every state. I miss the certainty of that UK election experience of the broadcast cutting out to the reading out of the vote numbers with that very particular town hall echo, followed by an incoherent acceptance speech by the MP accompanied by the drunken cheers of his supporters. Another weird election snake-with-tail-in-mouth is in Colorado, where the ballot includes an amendment to change the electoral college system to proportional representation, thus changing the outcome of the presidential election