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Cotswolds

Return to Americashire

Posted on December 8, 2013

Our month-long return to the Cotswolds is off to a fine start. We took the long way here from Los Angeles, stopping for a night and day in Boston before continuing on to Heathrow last night. Our goal was to break the journey into two, five-ish hour flights instead of one epic flight, but the stop in Boston also served as a cultural transition. New England, with her crisp air and preppy-fied populace, prepared us well for Ye Olde England.

Despite the air traffic control tumult of yesterday, our flight touched down on-time and before long we were whizzing along the M4 in our festive rental car, a red Fiat Cinquecento. It’s merry but I’m not sure how she’ll handle ice or snow, so just as well it’s still relatively mild out. We took advantage of the weather to walk the four miles to the pub for a Sunday roast. The service was predictably uneven, but, on the first day back in town, this still seems endearing. (My guess is I’ll be ranting about English customer service well before the end of the month.) Roast pork and potatoes with a Yorkshire pudding also helped dispel any budding disgruntlement.

The only remaining goal of the day is to make it to 8pm before the jet lag wins. Next up is a quick jaunt to Berlin this week before returning to the Cotswolds. London and the Lake District also feature later on the agenda. For now, I’m so happy to be back and looking forward to sharing the rest of the adventure here.

Cotswolds

Ode to the Pheasant: It’s turkey time, but I’ve got pheasant on the mind

Posted on November 27, 2013

This blog first appeared on Anglophiles United

My move to the Cotswolds started in 2007 with a rented cottage for weekends away from London. It only took six months until my husband and I were seduced by the countryside into buying our own place, where we, along with legions of other Londoners, continued the weekend ritual of self-imposed exile for the next year. Then, finally, in 2009, I took a job within commuting distance of our weekend village and left the city behind for good.

It was not, however, my status as a full-time resident that made me finally feel like a local. This, instead, was marked by the evolution of my attitude towards a bird, a feathered creature that dominates the English rural landscape by virtue of both its abundance and airheadedness. I write, of course, of the pheasant.

My early encounters with the creature were marked by fawning. While out on a bike ride I would stop to admire the miniature beasts as they foraged the fields: the male with his crimson masquerade mask over a hood of teal, the female cloaked in a humbler but still handsome pattern of nutty browns. (I couldn’t help admiring mother nature for the role reversal from humans in giving the male the responsibility for seducing a mate with his sartorial flair.) But soon my fawning and photographing morphed into annoyance. Too often when caught off guard—which was, apparently, always—the pheasant would panic and scurry toward our bikes rather than away. On the steep downhills of the wolds, the pheasant became responsible for one too many near misses of going head over handlebars. The same was true for driving; these birds are drawn to rather than repelled by headlights. I suppose it was inevitable, but the time finally came when such an encounter ended badly for both bird and car. It happened too fast to be sure, but there, on the steep downhill-side of the Fossebridge dip in the moments before impact, I’m sure I spotted this death-wish-with-a-plume flying straight for the car grill.

Not long after, I had my second encounter with a dead pheasant, this time in a farmhouse kitchen where my husband and I had been invited for Sunday lunch. This weekly gathering is a fixture of English life, and a ritual I had admired since we first moved from Los Angeles to London. Now we had been invited to our first Sunday lunch since becoming residents of the Cotswolds, and we were titillated at the prospect. We joined our hosts and two other guests around a weathered pine table, where the pheasant pie was served in a puff pastry-topped casserole dish, much the same as an American chicken pot pie. When I remarked with enthusiasm to the hostess that it was the first time I had ever eaten pheasant, she dismissed the dish as an excuse to rid her freezer of them. (Hers is a sentiment I imagine is shared by hundreds of other spouses of game shooters all around the English countryside.) Despite this, I enjoyed the meal, relieved to learn there was a savory use for this majestic if dopey bird. The afternoon continued to deliver on all my expectations of a proper English Sunday lunch. By the time snowflakes started dancing outside the kitchen window, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson had walked through the door and joined us for the cheese course.

My transition from London expat to Cotswold local had been gradual, marked by subtle milestones—the first time I wore tweed without irony, for instance. But it wasn’t until I asked for a second helping of pheasant pie in that farmhouse kitchen that I felt like a real Cotswoldian for the very first time. Should you ever be in the position to make use of a pheasant that has met with an unfortunate end, here’s that recipe for pheasant pot pie:

Ingredients
3.5 tbsp (about half a stick) butter
1/2 lb. pancetta
4 leeks, cut into large chunks
3 celery sticks, sliced
3 carrots, halved lengthwise and sliced
2 bay leaves
3 tbsp plain flour
1 and 1/4 cups cider
2 cups chicken stock
2 tbsp double cream
6 pheasant breasts, skinned and cut into large chunks
3 tbsp wholegrain mustard
1 tbsp cider vinegar
1 package of puff pastry
plain flour, for dusting
egg beaten with a little milk, to glaze

Directions
Heat the butter in a casserole dish and cook the pancetta for 1 minute until it changes color. Add the leeks, celery, carrots and bay leaves, and cook until they start to soften. Stir the flour into the vegetables until it goes a sandy color, then add the cider and reduce. Pour in the chicken stock, stir, then add the cream. Season, then bring everything to a simmer. Add the pheasant and gently simmer for 20 minutes until the meat and vegetables are tender. Stir through the mustard and vinegar, then turn off the heat and cool.

Heat oven to 425 degrees. Pour the mixture into a large rectangular dish. Roll the pastry out on a floured surface, place over the dish and trim round the edges, leaving an overhang. Brush the pastry with egg, then decorate with any leftover pastry, if you like. Sprinkle with a little sea salt. The pie can now be frozen for up to 1 month; defrost completely before baking. Bake for 30-35 minutes until golden. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Cotswolds

A Family-Friendly Foodie Guide to the Cotswolds

Posted on September 8, 2013

One of my enduring memories of Paris is eating lunch at a sidewalk café on the Rue Cler next to a table at which the most radiant French family was also dining. Their party included several small children, all wearing outfits that appeared to cost substantially more than the contents of my entire wardrobe, and all sitting politely and using utensils to do adept things like remove slices of buffalo mozzarella from a deconstructed caprese salad served in a jam jar. They were the embodiment of Pamela Zuckerman’s book, French Children Don’t Throw Food, and I experienced a moment of deep national envy.

But never fear: Even if the manners and tastes of your little ones are lacking the luster of my ideal French family, it’s no reason to compromise your own gastronomic ambitions on your next holiday in the Cotswolds. Granted, you’re probably not going to be dining avec les tout-petits at any Michelin-starred restaurants, although, for the record, there are four of them in the area, including the three-starred Le Champion Sauvage in Cheltenham. Instead, try one of the options in our family-friendly foodie guide, each handpicked to keep all ages’ palates pleased.

A gourmet guide

Say Cheese
It’s the mainstay of childrens’ diets around the world, whether served on toast or atop macaroni. Luckily the Cotswolds is full of it, from Double Gloucester to goats’ milk varieties. Look out for offerings from the Windrush Valley Goat Dairy and CerneyCheese while shopping at the acclaimed Saturday Stroud Farmers’ Market or The Cotswold Table, a newer market with a growing reputation that takes place on select Sundays in Kingham. Alternately, if royal baby mania has drawn you to the market town of Tetbury—home to new grandparents Charles and Camilla—stop in the House of Cheese. It specializes in farm-made cheeses and stocks 120 types.

Luscious Libations
Let’s face it, you’re going to need some wine to go with all that cheese. The Ox House WineCompany in Northleach specializes in offerings from small producers around the world. Indulge in their great selection of wines by the glass while the kids enjoy a hot chocolate. Don’t miss the wine barn in the back for great bottles to take away. As an added bonus, the World of Mechanical Music is just across the square and offers and eccentric assortment of self-playing music and automata to keep the kids amused.

Festival Fun
Why not make a day of gluttony at one of the many food festivals that take place throughout the Cotswolds? The British Asparagus Festival in the Vale of Evesham includes a mascot, Gus the Asparagus Man, and, this year, an asparagus-shaped soapbox cart, the AsparaCart. In other words, it just may succeed in making vegetables interesting to your kids. Other festivals to be on the lookout for include the Cheltenham Food Festival, and the Cotswold Food and Farming Festival in Bourton-on-the-Water.

Farm-to-Table
Farm-to-table eating is all the rage, and there’s no better place to teach kids about where food comes from than the Cotswolds. Start with a visit to a working farm like Butts Farm in South Cerney, near Cirencester. The shop is open year round, and, from Easter until the end of September, kids can help bottle feed lambs, collect eggs, and milk goats. To up the luxury quotient, stop into Daylesford Organic near Kingham, the mothership of the eponymous outlets in London, Surrey, and Tokyo. The food produced for their shop and café doesn’t come cheap, but it does come straight from their animals, creamery and market garden and tastes divine.

Sweet Treats
End your visit to the Cotswolds on a sweet note with an evening at The Pudding Club in Mickleton, a lovely village
on the northern edge of the Cotswolds, close to both Hidcote Manor Garden and Stratford-upon-Avon. The lofty aim of The Pudding Club is to preserve the traditional English pudding, from Sussex Pond to Spotted Dick, but it’s really just an excuse to eat seven puddings for supper. For something simpler but just as sweet, try Winstones Cotswold Ice Cream Shop on the edge of the National Trust’s Rodborough Common.

Note: This post originally appeared on HomeAway.co.uk on the same date it’s back-published here.

Books

Great British Summer Goodreads Giveaway

Posted on July 11, 2013

Last summer the UK had the Olympics, but this summer isn’t too shabby either. The Stones finally played Glastonbury, Andy Murray won Wimbledon, and, according to Twitter, Kate Middleton is in labour as I type. To celebrate all things great about this Great British summer, there’s a Goodreads giveaway for my book, Americashire, running now through August 8th. Hurry on over and enter now. It’s open to UK residents as well as many of the notable former colonies (by which I mean Australia, Canada and the U.S.).

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Americashire

by Jennifer Richardson

Giveaway ends August 08, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2011: A Tale of Two Cities

Posted on December 23, 2011

This year’s Christmas letter is being written later than usual. I blame Facebook. After a year of prolific posting, I am frankly bored of myself. (I can only imagine how my Facebook friends feel.) Still, despite the never-ending status updates featuring snapshots of husband drinking Riesling, there are a few things left to say about our year.

River Spree, Berlin

2011 is a tale of two cities, one I will tell here in the type of revisionist history that befits a Christmas letter. In other words I will highlight all the best bits and skim over the seething underbelly of marital discontent I provoked by our move to the first of those two cities, Berlin. It was not exactly a life of hardship, what with the company-sponsored Mercedes and apartment, not to mention all that two-euro-a-glass Riesling. And yet while I revelled in nostalgia from my childhood time there in the eighties (courtesy of my father’s employment flying shuttles with Pan Am), husband felt like he had gone back in time to the grim environs of northwest England circa 1976.

To cheer him up we made frequent visits back to the Cotswolds, like the time we went back to celebrate a little local wedding. We watched from the wine bar — where else? — as Kate and Wills tied the knot, then celebrated our own tenth wedding anniversary a few months later in Paris. But returning to Berlin did not get any easier for husband, although it was lightened by a few welcome visits from friends and family. Late in the summer my personal best interest aligned with my professional best interest when I finagled a new job opportunity at my company into a move stateside, where husband was yearning to return. And so in October I bid my goodbyes to Berlin—her golden Lizzy, her Käsespätzle, her nudist Tiergarten sunbathers.

Elterwater, Lake District

We returned to England where we were treated to a special melodrama facilitated by the US embassy in
London. Husband went in for what should have been a routine visa interview, and yet somehow my plans for post-interview celebratory champagne at Claridge’s turned into manic taxi rides around London securing missing paperwork before degenerating into a week of obsessive waiting for his visa to arrive. When it did we finally felt secure enough to start saying our goodbyes to those places and people we had grown to love most over the past six and a half years, up in the Lakes then back down in the Cotswolds where our last stop before Heathrow was, naturally, the wine bar.

Boston Common

In November we arrived in the second city of our tale of two: Boston. We quickly felt at home — it’s not called New England for nothing. (Husband was, I daresay, a bit miffed to find that his collection of cravats, bow ties, and tweeds would fail to achieve the desired effect of standing out as English in this town.) After skirting our way around “hills” in Europe — the still-waiting-for-gentrification perimeter of Notting Hill, the ‘wolds, and atop an old rubble heap that comprises one of the few rises in Berlin — we have settled on Beacon Hill, complete with views of the Common and Public Garden. Sure being above one of the busiest crossroads in the city means it sometimes sound like we are sitting track-side at Nascar, but never mind for now. We are told that soon enough the snow will come, nature’s welcome muffler.

The year has ended on a sad note. My grandmother, Willie Pearl, passed away at the age of ninety-two. (I wrote a little about her here.) There is nothing nice about death, but the fact that this one happened so close to Christmas forced my family to let go of any expectation about the holiday. There are fewer presents under the tree and no turkey in the freezer. This is all fine with me. At the risk of having an expectation, I’d be happy with scrambled eggs for Christmas dinner.

Merry Christmas to you and yours, whatever your table holds!

Cotswolds Random

Aspect Ratio

Posted on November 4, 2011

Last night we partook in one of our cherished Cotswold rituals for the last time (for now), a film in the private cinema at Barnsley House. We narrowed our selection down to two respectable classics, the original Italian Job or A Streetcar Named Desire. Only when the concierge could find neither did husband suggest we indulge in a reprisal of Notting Hill. Two glasses of wine and Hugh Grant at his floppiest were promptly sourced, and a few minutes later we had taken our places on the cinema’s candy pink loveseats.

Of course this ritual would be incomplete without husband deciding about five minutes into the film that there was something sub-optimal about the quality of our viewing experience. It didn’t matter we were watching a nineties romcom instead of some Blu-ray sci-fi extravaganza; husband has his standards. Hugh Grant had hardly made his way to work in his travel bookstore before husband was shoving past me to go into the projector room. A minute later he had managed to totally disable the picture and we were listening to Hugh’s amiable patter to the accompaniment of a black screen. Husband declared there was obviously something wrong with the projector and brought the lights up. I stayed seated, closed my eyes and sighed a silent sigh before offering to call down to reception to see if they could help. More flapping ensued, and before long Hugh and Julia were back, this time at the proper aspect ratio as husband took pleasure in pointing out to me.

You see husband has a full-blown obsession with aspect ratios. We are not allowed to watch anything on television or at the cinema, never mind if it is our television or cinema, without husband tinkering with the aspect ratio to ensure the image is being projected as the creator intended: strictly no stretched faces, cut off pictures, or fuzzy edges allowed. At worst this is a symptom of control freakdom; at best a sincere respect for the crafts of television and film. Most the time I can’t tell the difference, or, if I can, don’t care. A slightly distorted Hugh and Julia are good enough for me.

This is, of course, emblematic of how we both approach life. Husband is fussy and precise and under the illusion that the more he frets the more he can control. I am, well, a little sloppy and prone to let things happen to me rather than trying to ‘make things happen.’ (In my defense, the things that happen to me have worked out pretty ok so far.) Of course the truth is there are times and places more suited to one approach over the other, those times when the aspect ratio in life really does matter. And credit where credit is due: husband is the one who pushed me to force the issue of moving back to the U.S. when I was offered a new job within my current company, and it worked. I’m not so sure husband has yet taken any laissez-faire cues from me, but at least I can leave England knowing I’ve seen Notting Hill as it was meant to be.

Boston Cotswolds

Countdown to Boston

Posted on October 22, 2011

With only two weeks to go in the Cotswolds, the move to Boston is starting to feel very real. The cottage has been rented, our temporary housing in Cambridge arranged, and all but five items on my thirty-five item strong “to do” list have been crossed off. (I am starting to find new ones though, like buying that box of mini-mince pies at Waitrose yesterday so we can have a bit of England in Boston come Christmas time.)

What remains ahead are movers and farewells. I have meetings in London on Tuesday, so we will say our goodbyes to the city then. I should be doing those things I somehow never got around to doing, like visiting the Soane Museum and walking around the dome of St. Paul’s, but instead I am pretty sure we will just have a coffee at Bar Italia, a glass of prosecco at Negozio Classica, and dinner at the Electric, all things we have done tens of times before. It is, after all, the routines that you miss.

In the Cotswolds I will say my goodbyes this way. I will ride my bike to Burford one more time, stopping for awhile at the point that looks like a Turner landscape painting right by the Windrush in Sherborne. I will get irritated at how long the line is at the Abbey Home Farm café near Ciren, but wait anyway for one more delicious vegetarian lunch. We will buy drinks for the regulars at the wine bar next Saturday and the next morning we will go to church, where I will join Dorothy in asking for good health for the queen in the prayers of penitence and, if I am lucky, we will sing a rousing rendition of Christ Triumphant Ever Reigning to the tune of Guiting Power. And then, on our very last day, we will partake in the British institution of Sunday roast with close friends. Like I said, it’s the routines you miss.

Cotswolds

A Real Englishwoman

Posted on August 23, 2011

Summer in the Cotswolds happened on Sunday. After a week of decidedly undecided weather, the sun finally took control. It shone down all afternoon, including on the little garden party in Ablington where I spent a couple of pleasant hours. There were sausages on sticks and pink wine, although, since I was driving, I stuck mostly to water scented with elderflower cordial and served in a little green glass. The lawn was littered with the usual suspects, including A., who grows increasingly eccentric looking each time I see him what with the cloth Mao jacket and his ring-bedecked fingers. Waving the eccentric banner for the women was J., who is always good for a leopard-skin print accessory. This time it came in the form of her booties which had nothing to do, least of all matching, with the bright red jeans and flower print blouse she was also wearing.

The whole event was one of those quintessential English experiences, like a Sunday roast in a cozy pub or a candelabra-lit picnic on the grounds of a grand old country house. And as I notch each one up, I feel like I am having my own personal Velveteen Rabbit experience, getting closer and closer to becoming a “real” Englishwoman. Maybe one day soon the Nursery Magic Fairy will show up and make me “real” to everyone else. For now, I am pretty sure that to most of my fellow Cotswoldians I remain the loud American.

Cotswolds

The Witches’ Table

Posted on August 18, 2011

To get to the barn that houses the main retail area of the wine bar you have to cross the courtyard out back. When the weather is mild, the courtyard is also a pleasant place to sit and enjoy a glass of wine. In the far corner of the courtyard there is a large table fashioned out of an old French door painted blue and mounted on rod iron trestle legs. It is large enough to seat ten comfortably. In fact it may seat ten too comfortably, which would at least partially explain its evil influence. For when one sits at the recently christened Witches’ Table, one rarely leaves the wine bar sober.

Husband and I fell under the spell of the Witches’ Table earlier in the summer at the sardine bbq. This is the only explanation I have for the ten strips of raffle tickets (charity unknown, but I can safely assume it was for a good cause) and the small cut above my eyebrow that were in my possession when I awoke the next morning. I do recall that the occupants of the Witches’ Table that afternoon came up with an excellent outline for a panto we intended to stage at the village hall in winter: a mash-up of “Sin”-derella and Priscilla Queen of the Desert of the Cotswolds in which the struggle is to get Cinders to Pippa and Prince Harry’s wedding at the local inn (at which there was no room according to husband’s diligent BlackBerry notes and in an apparent misguided effort to weave in the Christmas story). I believe this falls safely into the category of it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. More recently the Witches’ Table cast its evil influence on one half of doppelgänger couple when, after an evening of wine and a misjudged shot of absinthe, he forcibly ejected the contents of his digestive tract via his mouth into the adjacent well. Thus forth it has been known as Crispin’s well.

On Tuesday evening we decided to brave another session at the Witches’ Table with the fairer half of doppelgänger couple (Crispin was still hanging his head in shame from the well incident). We had dinner reservations in half an hour and so, we assumed, there was no time for anything to go too far off the rails. The table was already in session when we joined, populated by seven of the usual suspects. Things got off to a safe start with a vigorous debate about the proper use of semi-colons that swiftly moved into a vigorous debate over the etiquette of turning an empty wine bottle upside down in its ice bucket. (In the end we agreed it was ok, as long as it wasn’t in somebody’s house.) Things generally proceeded in this vein of polite banter, with the small exception of when our local Roger Moore lookalike stood up to pour some wine and I complimented his arrowhead belt buckle, causing the entire table to look in the general direction of his crotch. In the end we had an unintended second bottle of wine and were an hour late for our table, which on balance is an excellent outcome for an evening at the Witches’ Table.

Cotswolds

Rarking

Posted on July 30, 2011

That’s right, I’ve just coined a new term: rarking, as in rural parking. I thought it was in the British spirit of things, like the way they call walking in the countryside “rambling.” I noticed this British phenomenon — rarking, not giving things that already have names new special names — again today when we were out riding our bikes around the ‘Wolds. On a little country lane near Yanworth we passed a couple staring into the middle distance from inside their parked car. I like to think they were faking this zen poise having been wildly necking moments before they noticed someone was coming, but somehow I doubt it.

Such rarking seems to be a bona fide hobby of a certain demographic of Brits, mostly nearly-but-not-quite-elderly drivers of Ford Mondeos. Sometimes the rarkers are eating a sandwich or even an ice cream, but mostly they just sit. They could easily leave the car and go for a walk or even, gasp, lay a blanket outside and enjoy the fresh air. But no, they prefer sitting in the car, as if the steel is some sort of protective shield between them and the possibility of a little too much stimulation brought on by the sheer beauty of the countryside. I want to stop and tell them that stiff upper lip works best when tolerating pain rather than experiencing pleasure, but I just ride on by.

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