For our first full day in Sicily, Monsieur and I took the advice of a friend and headed for the north-west coast of the island, to a town called Trapani. Dark clouds loomed but, ever the optimists, we drove on, along the autostrada where anti-mafia Judge Giovanni Falcone’s convoy was blown up by an under-road…
A Big Chill at Vaux le Vicomte
On a bone-chilling day in December last year, keen to walk off some of that devillish foie gras that French people (and this particular Kiwi) love to consume at Christmas, Monsieur and I and a couple of the in-laws visited Vaux le Vicomte. For those men who salivate over Eva Longoria Parker and for the women who aspire…
London Dunderground…Again
(photo courtesy of TFL’s press images) The Epicurienne Day Job has zero to do with food or travel, apart from having to travel to and from work each day on The Dunderground. The frequent long waits on one of the lines I use are frustrating. I can never predict when I will reach work. If…
Minnie the Wonder Bunny
When I was a wide-eyed early twenty-something, I moved from my hometown of Auckland to Sydney to work at a hotel in King’s Cross and no, it wasn’t offering ‘private client services’. At work, I made many wonderful friends, most of whom were gay because (a) the hotel industry is known for being a pink profession…
Lighten Up by Jill Dupleix
For the true grub-loving gastronome, the most fatal by-product of enjoying our food has to be weight gain. Monsieur and I are no different, loving our food as we do and engaged in a constant battle of taste versus calorific content. It was therefore serendipitous to catch a tweet from Quadrille Books, asking for bloggers…
Getting to know you…London Bloggers’ Meetup Blogtag
An embarrassing while ago, Andy Bargery of London Bloggers’ Meetup Group, tagged me in Blogtag. The aim of this is to learn more about our fellow meetup compatriots and to increase our communication as a group, both in and out of the ether. Here’s how it goes: I tag three people from the LBM, including…
A Very Sicilian Supper
One night in Palermo, Monsieur and I decided not to take the restaurant recommendations of the hotel or our travel guides; instead we would sniff out somewhere good in the neighbourhood. Little did we know that this would be one of THE dining experiences of the entire Sicilian expedition and NOT because of the food….
The first supper at Zafferano
It was getting dark as Monsieur and I set off to explore something of Palermo on our first day in Sicily. We enjoyed the window-shopping along the Via R Settimo, later rejoining the broad Via Roma, where discount shops and mobile phone outlets were busy with post-Christmas sale business. My favourite window was for a…
Leave the car. Take the cannoli
Landing at Palermo airport is not for those who’ve failed a fear of flying course. The runway is bordered by the sea, and the final descent goes something like this: fly along a bit, drop a bit, along a bit, PLUMMET, bump, bump, reverse thrust and breeeeeeathe. It’s the PLUMMET part which feels truly life-threatening,…
Don Epicurienne
It’s always a relief to me when Christmas is over. Following all the over-eating, excitable families, pressure to spend, emotional blackmail to eat more, stay longer and be energetic, happy beings, in spite of any work-related year-end exhaustion, I find myself in desperate need of escape. Forget peace on earth and goodwill to men. Few…
Hot and Cold in Enna
When you think of Sicily, what comes to mind? For me, it’s a curious mixture of things: the dreaded ‘clan’, Mount Etna, cannoli and some seriously glowing mosaics, sweet Marsala wine drunk IN Marsala, ancient Greek temples and being so sick that I couldn’t speak. The first time I visited the island at the bottom…
From aspic setting to lobster killing – Julie and Julia do French cooking
When I was about eleven, I started home ec classes at school. My classmates and I then spent the next two years fighting over ingredients in these core classes as we perfected the mangling of simple dishes such as scrambled eggs and kedgeree. The worst part of these classes, however, was post-cooking when we had to sit and EAT what we’d just burned,…
Epicurienne 