On coming home...

This is just a little update on what I've been upto since I've been back...

We arrived home a week after my birthday in late October. We had just been on a pretty sweet adventure through three countries, and had spent a brilliant year living it up in China, putting our 'career lives' on hold while we travelled around, dabbled in Chinese, drank and ate like it was going out of fashion and met some great friends in the process. Why on earth were we coming back? It's a question I still ask myself now sometimes. Well, we had to come back eventually and we were really missing our family and friends back in the UK, plus it was about time we stopped dossing around and cracked on with sorting out the career situation. All viable reasons of course...but the main reason? I'm not saying I missed food more than my family and friends, but...well, it was certainly up there.

As much as I loved Chinese food, and miss it immensely, I constantly thought about the food back home while I was away. It wasn't necessarily even British food that I missed, but the diversity. Chinese cuisine is as varied as a whole continent's worth- a topic which sooner or later I am sure to discuss- but there's still a whole lotta world out there to eat. Many of the Western ingredients and cuisines in China are expensive to get hold of and a lot of the time just aren't any good. I dreamt of sumptuous French pastries, moules marinères and steak frites; sun dried tomatoes, pesto and lemon flavoured olive oil; chorizo, iberico ham and gambas pil pil; of chicken and asparagus pie, roast lamb and lemon tart. And cheese, glorious cheese! Brie and comté, manchego and montgomery cheddar, feta and chèvre...you get the picture. Ooh, and wine! That's another story...

Just some of the things I missed while I was away...and have subsequently made.

You can imagine therefore, that in the first week of my return to the UK, I positively feasted on everything in sight. My first supper was soft goat's cheese spread on hot, buttery toast, which was lush, the goat's cheese one of a few ingenious gastronomic gifts from my Dad, and was followed by a mountain of similarly delicious foods, warm fresh bread, bacon sandwiches, steak and chips, crème brulée, sausages and mash, my Nana's Sunday lunch, and strangely, a lot of corned beef pasties from Greggs.

I'm telling you, living abroad really does make you miss Greggs. Who'd have believed it!

Skip ahead a few months, and I have thankfully curbed my eating habits slightly (otherwise I'd be the size of a house), but my love of cooking will always be a threat to my figure. Devout of a decent oven in China, I have resorted to baking like crazy, and cooking whatever I wasn't able to in the Far East, from Italian to Middle Eastern, and classic British to French. I'm currently working at a luxury food hall in London (most people know but I won't mention it in case I get one of those lawsuit thingys), where I'm essentially a glorified shelf stacker, but it's good experience for my future in food, the perks are good and I do get good discounts on very yummy and expensive produce.

And so another chapter begins in my persuit of exciting foodie adventures...