29 November 2014

My, how time does fly, but that’s what happens when a small person shares your roof. The Crevette is a proper little girl now, walking about and eating Real Food. She loves music and boogies down in the kitchen while I cook – entertaining the chef, so to speak. Meanwhile, I’m excited to say that I’ve started to write freelance, have just returned from my first press trip since the Crev arrived and have a bounce in my step every day. Now if I can just lose the last eight kilos of preggy weight, I’ll be thrilled. Watch out for my series on Dublin, duck recipes for Gressingham and some great gift ideas for Christmas. Less than a month to go, my pretties! I’m already planning the Christmas lunch and shock, horror, this year it WON’T involve a big bird.

20 September 2013

This year, BIG changes in the Epic household as Monsieur and I increased its number by one small person, our daughter, The Crevette (Shrimp). She’s only a few months old at this stage, but is full of life, with a personality many times her size. We’re quite certain that The Crevette is ours, in every possible way, because she’s already fascinated by the smell of food and gazes in wonderment at people chewing. We’re still a way off weaning her onto solids, poor love, so she’s stuck on milk for now, but time is already passing so quickly that too soon we’ll be puréeing everything in sight and our walls and floors will be in danger of redecoration with thrown/ spilled/ regurgitated food. The Crevette has already been across to the land of her forefathers (France) twice and has proven herself to be a really good little traveller. Of course there’s still plenty of time for that to change, but so far, we’re happy that she seems to enjoy the things we love: food and travel, and hope that the three of us will share many adventures in the future. Note to Eurodisney: until the recent reports of lack of maintenance, re-heated food and cancelled performances, you were high on our to-visit-list for when the Crevette gets a little older, so please work hard to restore the Magic Kingdom to its formerly magic status in the meantime! Every child needs a little bit of Disney in their life.

2 September 2011

It’s been a while. Since my father died in January, my mojo has been somewhat MIA so Epicurienne has sadly suffered some neglect. But as autumn rounds the corner and the days shorten, I feel the quiet rumblings of the writer in me coming back to life. To celebrate (and taking on board the recent comment telling me that the previous site theme with cursive font was hard to read) I’ve finally gone .co.uk with the blog. (about time, really) and jazzed up the look of Epicurienne with a funky colour scheme and techy buttons for everything, from comments to social media links. I hope you like it, but more importantly, I hope you can read it.

So thank you for your patience whilst I had my much-needed break from blogging. It’s time to post some new material. On y va!

17 August 2010

It’s embarrassing how little I’ve posted on Epicurienne recently, but that’s what happens when you plan a wedding. One minute, your life is yours. The next minute you feel possessed by an evil demon with an addiction to confetti.com and bridal magazines. Unless you blog about wedding accessories or event coordination, it’s not exactly conducive to the success of the Big Day to blog a lot. Besides which, there’s barely an opportunity in the day (or night, as I found with wedding nightmares) to think about anything other than table plans, floral arrangements or cake flavours.

Monsieur and I have now been married for 3 months and all is certainly well in that arena, but I hadn’t expected to be so busy AFTER the nuptials. Since returning from honeymoon, we have been guests at 3 more weddings. The count would have increased to 4 but we were on our way back from Hawaii when the first wedding after ours took place so sadly could not attend. It’s safe to say, however, that we’re a bit wedding-ed out.

Then there are the thank you cards, which have been handwritten in three languages, and which due to almost every weekend involving some sort of important social event, are STILL not finished. Blogging when you should be writing thank you cards is an excellent recipe for guilt.

So it will be with some relief that Monsieur and I take our next break because heavens, it’s been quite a year. Life in an ashram is something I’m seriously fantasising about right now. More meditation and less pressure would be oh-so-incredibly welcome in our lives, at least for a month or two. Endless vegetarian dahl, scrubbing floors and early morning prayers would be totally bearable if I knew that inner calm was at the end of it all.

Anyway, there’s the update. More news soon, I hope.  Now I just have to stop dreaming about having to have another wedding for the guests who couldn’t make it to the first one. What on earth is going on in the Epic subconscious is anyone’s guess.

21 November 2008

Gosh, I just realised that I haven’t updated Epic says for a while now. What’s been happening since July? Well… Monsieur and I jetted off to explore Vietnam for a couple of weeks at the end of the summer so you can look forward to lots of posts about that amazing country. I would have written more about Vietnam already but for the lack of time. You see, when we got back, we made a lot of redundancies at work, so there was mayhem in my Day Job. Then I accidentally won a trip to the Blog08 conference in Amsterdam by entering a London Bloggers’ Meetup competition. That kept me busy for a while and I’m just managing to get the posts about Amsterdam done now. Meanwhile, my readership has climbed nicely so that I’m getting 3500-4000 page views per month (still on the UP). And I’m having fun with a PR company called Splendid Communications, who’ve recognised my passion for food and are keeping me busy trying out some of their clients’ wares.

What’s next? Sadly, more redundancies, so more headaches and more late nights. I’m all set to try out Tampopo’s pan-Asian cuisine tonight, with Snog frozen yoghurt in South Kensington on my Must Try Next list. Then there’s the 30 day challenge from the people at Good Oil – more about that later, and before you know it there’ll be Christmas. But first we have to move offices at the Day Job. Ouch.

3 July 2008

Gosh, things are busy here. Finally, the credit crunch redundancy syndrome has hit my workplace and several people have already been let go with more on the horizon. Things are tough and look to get worse before they get better. Meanwhile, Monsieur’s mother is visiting us over the weekend so we’ll be busy seeing the sights with her. Being London, we have both a wet weather plan (museums and concerts) and a dry weather plan (parks and cruises). Luckily, there’s never a shortage of things to do with visitors here. Making the choice of what to do is the hard part.

Anyway, I’ve pre-written my posts for the weekend so will be posting away each morning before we go out (I hope) but I may not be able to comment much for a few days. Don’t stress, I will be baaa-aaaack, just like that annoying Poltergeist child.

Epic

7 May 2008

Well, after that deafening (or perhaps pleasant??) silence from Epicurienne, I’m back, and conscious of not having blogged much in the past week. Fret not! I have plenty to say, just need more time to say it. And out of principle I refuse to pay over-the-odds amounts for WiFi access in hotels, so I tried to look at this as an enforced holiday from my blog. It was almost as bad as quitting a bad habit. I itched and twitched and fidgeted and craved. Anyway, I’m back so get ready for the onslaught!

27 April 2008

Hi Epicuri-fans,

Thank you all so much for visiting this site. I have amazingly gone up from 88 views in March to 466 so far in April! It’s hard to believe, and it’s all thanks to you!

Anyway, Monsieur and I are off to Paris and Brussels later this week. We’re going to be Big Kids for a (long) weekend and visit Parc Astérix as well as the Hergé sites in Brussels. I’ve never been to Belgium before, apart from passing through, long ago, on business trips that didn’t allow for much more than a cursory visit to a road-side café. I’m much looking forward to seeing the home of Tintin, the boy journalist, and visiting the stuffed horse at that famous bar, Le Roy d’Espagne.

If you’ve been to Brussels, please e-mail me with advice for what to see and do.

In the meantime, I won’t be writing as many blogs for several days while we’re away, but will be logging on to grab your comments and suggestions re: what’s what in Belgium. Obviously, I’ll write about how we get on as soon as poss, once we’re back.

Warm wishes,

Epic

16 April 2008

Just a quick note to say that yes, I am still alive, even though I haven’t been able to create many posts in the past week. To look forward to? More about Malaysia, some insights into playing Pollyanna’s ‘Glad Game’ and Epicurus on pain.

Please send comments… and if you would like me to write about anything in particular, suggest away.

Epic

5 April 2008

Hi there,

Thanks for dropping by and having a look at what Epicurienne has to say. It still surprises me that so many of you do!

At the moment I’m beginning to realise how big the blogging world is and finally feel that I have enough content to start promoting this blog. I’m almost embarrassingly excited because yesterday I joined London Bloggers Meet Up and signed up for their next night out. Can’t wait! Hopefully some of you will be there to teach me a thing or two about blogging. I admit I’m struggling with some of the page set-up here at WordPress, but that’s not because of WordPress; I just have to learn my way around the functions. I think I’m getting there (slowly) but I don’t want to go for the CSS upgrade until I understand the basics so please forgive the site for still looking so generic.

Yesterday my latest Amazon order arrived. Another cause for celebration! Inside was a comic-strip book called Epicurus – The Sage by William Messner-Loebs and Sam Kieth. It’s been very well reviewed so I’m looking forward to talking about it soon. My aim is to be able to write a series of blogs about life from an Epicurean perspective, discussing concepts one step at a time and how it all comes together in our own experience, so please feel free to comment and debate with me and other readers. That’s the whole point of philosophy, isn’t it? I’m still learning a lot about the teachings of Epicurus and I’m sure to find the odd thing I/we won’t agree with, but it certainly gives us all something to think about in this crazy, materialist, rat-maze of a world.

In the meantime, remember to LIVE AND LET LIVE. See you soon…

Epic.