The year in review: 2013 is my kind of uneventful; lots of good stuff, no crises

In my blog entry on the first day of this year,  I said that all I wanted out of 2013 was for it to be uneventful.  No deaths, major illnesses, job changes, property sales, house moves or any other significant life events.  I'm delighted to report success.  We just settled in to our home, enjoyed our friends and had some lovely holidays. 

The biggest life news was the arrival of baby Bruno.  Official Kennel Club name Captain Brunelleschi.  An adorable, very smart but very energetic cavalier King Charles spaniel who’s chewed a lot of things he should not have.  We love him anyway.  Brother Datchet tolerates him, though insists on stealing any chew toy he’s given.  (Exacerbating the tendency to chew illicit items.)

On the job front, my employer and role hasn’t changed but my boss has, making things more fun and relevant than they’ve been in a while.  I try never to write about anything so mundane as work on this blog, but I do have every intent of doing more blogging on marketing topics in the New Year.  Those of you who are interested can follow me at http://ferraraoncomms.blogspot.co.uk.

Even an uneventful year for us is filled with travel, of course.  We discovered Malta for a long weekend around Valentine’s Day, where I got a much-needed shot of sun and sea.  Easter brought our Franco-Italian road trip, with wine tasting through Burgundy and my husband’s introduction to Tuscany.  

Summer holiday saw Piers suffering a family-, baseball-, country music-, bbq-drenched July 4^th in St. Louis before recovering with sophisticated culture in Chicago.  (Where I got to catch up with my  Northwestern University friends and introduce them to Piers.)  My annual girls’ trip with Lisa and Hillary found us exploring Iceland.  In November, Piers joined me at the end of a business trip in Barcelona for fine food and fantastic architecture.  All trips covered, as ever, in earlier entries on this blog.

Banishing the adjective “new” from our home has been a priority of the year.  My proudest accomplishment is transforming the garden from a featureless strip of new-laid turf to a terraced space with cascading water feature, herbaceous borders, raised brick herb beds and latticed pergolas in just one season.  Now, the plants just need to grow.  Inside, picture framing, wallpaper and curtains are making certain rooms … particularly our bedroom, the dining room and my office … feel “finished”.

Life in England continues to offer a moving feast of culture.   Our opera schedule took in The Mikado at the ENO; Parsifal broadcast from the Met; Don Carlo and Carmen live at the Royal Opera House and The Sicilian Vespers broadcast from there; and La Boheme at Longborough Festival Opera (where we became patrons this year).  I went a bit more populist with The Book of Mormon and Wicked in London’s West End.  The V&A’s blockbuster movie costume exhibition wasn’t as good as expected and the Manet show at the Royal Academy left me cold, but the National Portrait Gallery’s show on Prince Henry Stuart impressed and the British Museum’s Pompeii exhibit was the show of the year.  The Highclere battle proms and Chelsea Flower Show were English summer classics made better by our unusually warm and sunny summer.  Again, you can read all about these in past entries.

And when it comes to proper feasting … we cooked up a storm this year, giving seven formal dinner parties, a handful of casual summer barbecues and one large holiday blow-out.  We were endlessly inspired by dining out, of course.  In addition to all those lovely meals while travelling, highlights at home included the Michelin-starred glories of The Ledbury, Gordon Ramsay’s Hospital Road Restaurant and L’Ortolan.  But we’re almost as excited about the fact that our local, the Four Horseshoes, has a new chef who's showing some magnificent potential.

All the culture, travel, socialising and fine dining is great, but it’s all icing atop the simple cake of cooking dinner in our own kitchen and then settling onto our couch with the dogs for a quiet night of TV.  And, of course, the fact that we have no health news worth reporting.  We are blessed.

We hope you are, too.  Best wishes for the holiday season and for the year ahead.  I hope you'll continue to drop by the blog in 2014, when I'll be introducing a few changes to liven things up.

A blessedly stereotypical Christmas with friends, family, fine food and a bit of panto

With two weeks off work, we briefly considered going somewhere for Christmas.  But, frankly, with some big trips in our sights for next year, we couldn't afford more travel over the holidays.  So "staycation" it was, with a focus on all the holiday traditions.

The house decked out in holiday cheer.  Christmas baking filling the kitchen with scents of cinnamon, nutmeg and clove.  I swore I'd learn how to make French macaron and by Christmas Eve I'd produced a passable set (the pistachio were best) to bring to my sister-in-law for Christmas lunch.

Up to St. Mary's Bourne Street … looking fabulous after several months under renovation … for the traditional glory of the candlelit carol service followed by Haydn's St. Nicholas Mass.  The kyrie alone is worth the drive.  The next day, back to London again for Christmas lunch at the Putney Bencards, complete with roast goose and impressively flaming pudding.

After all that to-ing and fro-ing to town we were delighted to spend Boxing Day at home.  But no rest for the wicked.  Or the hungry.  Our friend Hillary's parents were visiting from the States and we had them down for a pull-out-all-the-stops gourmet lunch in our recently-wallpapered, Christmas tree-bedecked dining room.

To nibble while the chef slaved in the kitchen:  shot glasses of spiced pumpkin soup, a platter of high-end charcuterie and foie gras spread on rounds of gingerbread.  First course was supposed to be salmon soufflé.  Clearly, we need to work on that one, as what we served was closer to a salmon frittata.  On to individual venison wellington parcels.  If you're in the "you can never have too much puff pastry" camp, this is the preparation for you.  With Piers' go-to fondant potatoes, spinach and a decorative frill of asparagus tops.  I claim pudding as the triumph of the meal.  (Then again, that was the course I was in charge of!)  Individual lemon tarts topped with Cointreau and cranberry compote.  And then a cheese course of decadent French choices procured last week at La Fromagerie off Marylebone High Street.

No offence to the traditional holiday menu, but that was a celebratory meal!

Christmas week wrapped with extended family and that most English of holiday activities:  Pantomime.    I've been to two productions in the past, including a Cinderella written by the incomparable Stephen Fry, and they've left me mildly amused but mostly puzzled.  Up until this week I thought you had to be raised in the panto tradition to really enjoy it.  Happily, Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Windsor proved me wrong.

Part of this was the quality of the production.  Though I'd never heard of any of the "stars" who made guest appearances, the comics were funny, the dancers energetic and the singing good.  The inclusion of recognisable pop songs and choreographed numbers gave the show a West End musical feel.  But what probably made the biggest difference was going with kids.

This was our Christmas outing with La Famille Demeneix.  We managed to get in plenty of adult conversation with Cora and Didier and enjoy time with the kids.  The youngest, just 5, is my godson and one of the highlights of my holiday season was assembling, then watching him open, his combined birthday and Christmas present.

Odd as it sounds for an American, I feel it's my job to keep him English.  He's never lived in the UK, and dad is French, so I figure his national identity needs a little help.  Every year I try to find something that waves a flag for home.  This year's theme was "knights in shining armour".  We started with a storybook I wrote him about Sir Sacha (that's him) and the multi-coloured dragon.  Which went with a crusader knight's costume, a large stuffed dragon, a wooden sword, shield and crossbow.  I don't know who was more excited, Sacha or me.

An hour later, sitting between him and his sister, watching them giggle in delight and yell "he's behind you!" … I got a dose of unrefined Christmas joy.  The best parts of Christmas put you in touch with your inner child.  It's much easier to reach her with real children to help.

ROH's Carmen is worth battling through a beastly night

Opera Review:  Carmen at the Royal Opera House
Restaurant Review:  The Amphitheatre Restaurant at the Royal Opera House

The storm that ripped across southern England brought torrential rains and gusts of wind up to 100 mph. Trees and power lines were down, low lying areas were flooded and there was chaos on the rail lines.  "We advise against travel unless it's an emergency" ran the headline atop Southwest Trains' website.

Yet there we were, battling through the foul night to get to Basingstoke station and then to fight our way to London.  Why?  We had tickets to Carmen at the Royal Opera House.  I'd fight through wind, rain and flood for most ROH performances, if only to prevent the loss of a very expensive ticket.  But for Carmen, I'd amplify my effort.

This is probably the easiest of the grand operas; a fast-paced, exciting tale of lust, betrayal, criminal gangs and murder with a string of recognisable melodies and some gypsy dancers and bull fighters thrown in for visual interest.  I'd seen it many times on television, but never live.  There was no way, short of a complete collapse of the rail system, that I was going to miss this opportunity.  Thus, despite more than two hours of delayed travel in each direction, we made it.

It was worth the effort.

I suspect it's probably difficult for any professional to put on a bad Carmen; the material is just too good.  But this one hummed along, and presented the eponymous character in the most overtly sexual and devious way I've ever seen it played.

Grand opera is all written by men, but if any of the greatest hits had been written by a woman, it would have been this one.  Maybe Bizet had some special insight.  Because Carmen … especially as presented to us in this version … is actually the story of the stupidity of men, and of every woman's greatest fear: her perfectly normal, promising, lovely husband/brother/son gets sucked in and destroyed by a tawdry sexual predator.  Our hero, Don Jose, has to be the dumbest lug in all opera, throwing away a promising career and a perfectly lovely girlfriend for the promise of some really gritty sex.  Carmen, inevitably, gets tired of him and moves on.  He, in his desolation, murders her.

This close to Christmas, we got the second string cast, but they delivered the goods.  Christine Rice's Carmen is sexual in the extreme.  (I'm not sure I'd take my pre-teen daughter to this one.)  As she's seducing Jose, she hoists her skirts up, slides a rose across her nether regions and tosses it to the crumbling idiot.  How tacky! We scream to ourselves.  Don't be taken in! We groan.  But we watch with resignation as all the men on stage follow Carmen around in a blind, lusty lather.  Younghon Lee's Don Jose is the tragic focus of her interest for a while.  This young tenor's acting still needs work, but his voice is lovely.

The staging has all the traditional fun you'd expect, with flamenco-dancing gypsies, a donkey and Escamilo's sexy bullfighter coming in on a black stallion.

We see the tragedy approaching, of course, and know how it's going to end.  There's a sense of triumph when this Jose stabs this Carmen; she's a tawdry life-wrecker and deserves to die.  It's just a shame that the lovely but spineless Don Jose is going to hang for dispatching her.

After forming my own opinions, I checked out the review from The Guardian, which says the staging is tired and old fashioned and the portrayal of Carmen as home wrecker disappointingly outdated.  The revisionist staging, you see, has Carmen as an independent spirit, trapped by the male hierarchy embodied by the hopelessly traditional Don Jose.  Oh, please.  (Then again, I always come out as Sandy rather than Rizzo when I do that "which Grease character are you" quiz.)  I don't need modern or innovative when it comes to classic opera.  I like big, showy and traditional, and that's what the ROH delivered.

I thought they missed an opportunity with the food, however.  We booked into their formal restaurant, on the top level less than 100 yards from our seats.  This is not a deal, at £40 - £50 for three nice-but-average courses before you start on the drinks.  But it's incredibly convenient.

We were less than 5 minutes from our seats.  Even with the crazy delays, we managed to get starters and mains in before the production started and enjoyed dessert and coffee at the interval.  No fighting across a rainy, wind-swept Covent Garden from a pre-theatre restaurant, no scrambling for space in the crowds at the interval.  All terribly civilised, with staff who cater to your every need (a special chutney whipped up at short notice for the tomato-allergic Piers) and run things like clockwork to get you to your seat at the last minute.  This is the operatic equivalent of the premium airport lounge.

I wish the food were more more memorable.  Beetroot cured salmon with creme fraiche and pickle.  Fine.  Bream fillet with truffle butter.  Very good.  Cheese platter.  Perfectly presentable.  But nothing remarkable and, given what we were there to see, nothing Spanish.  The bars were serving tapas, but the restaurant had nothing topical.  Shame.

Still, on such a beastly night, it was worth the money to stay dry and be pampered.

Tolkien proves a surprising social leveller, but he might be surprised at Jackson's edits

Film Review:  The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Before I met my husband, my opinion on online gaming and its players was fairly negative.  An enormous waste of time, indulged in by socially inept geeks who chose to isolate themselves from the real world to click buttons and tug joysticks in constant repetition of silly tasks.  Given that the love of my life spends at least six hours a week in the virtual Middle Earth of Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), and easily doubles or triples that if his diary allows, I've had to revise my opinion.

Gaming … at least this game … clearly develops multi-tasking skills.  It requires complex project management and long term thinking. (Piers, like most of his online compatriots, runs multiple characters who each perform certain tasks to help each other out.) If you love the novels, it's a magnificent way to immerse yourself in the universe.  The developers have taken enormous care with the sets and the plot details; I enjoy taking regular peeks over Piers' shoulder though I have no desire to start killing orcs.

And it turns out that it doesn't isolate you from other people at all.  As I learned last night, it has a democratising way of bringing unlikely people together in a way I can't imagine any other hobby would.

LOTRO is what's known as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, in which a large number of real people, all over the world, are taking on characters and playing together in a virtual world.  This is no niche:  revenues for the genre are predicted to hit $8 billion next year, and the top games cost as much to make as films.  Piers (who, thankfully, paid a one-time-for-life fee when LOTRO launched and is therefore not contributing to that revenue projection) wanders Middle Earth with a fellowship called the Rangers of Artherdain (for the Tolkein aficionados out there, Artherdain was one of the kingdoms of the North).  They are people who, like him, run multiple characters and all work together to pursue their quests, while chatting in an open IM stream.  Piers had been playing with, and talking to, these people for four years.  But had never met them face-to-face.  Until last night.  When we met up at the Odeon Leicester Square to see second film of Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy.

I thought I might have some wild tales to tell.  But, a wee bit disappointingly, they were all normal.  Nobody dressed as a dwarf, insisted on speaking Elvish or carried a wizard's staff.  All were capable of carrying on conversations that did not involve Middle Earth.  All had productive lives and jobs.  What was glaringly obvious, however, is just how different those lives and jobs were.

In the corporate world we talk a lot about diversity.  But life conspires against that.  Work throws us together.  Our jobs set our incomes.  Our incomes tend to set where we live.  All meaning that, even without active choice, we usually spend our lives with others of the same professional and economic background as ourselves.  And with that comes similar hobbies, cultural tastes, etc.  LOTRO brought these guys together without any socio-economic reference point.  Bringing me to one of the most diverse dinner tables I've ever sat at.

Joining us was a French-born grade school teacher living in Brussels, an Asian IT student, a landscape labourer and a grave digger.  (Seriously.)  I can't think of another situation that could have brought these people together.  And yet, there we were, chatting happily.  I can't say that the conversation would have easily stretched for too many hours, and things were always livelier when they returned to their shared passion of all things Tolkien.  But it was a good night, and were I a sociologist it would have triggered thoughts of a fascinating social study.

What of the film?


Peter Jackson, I fear, has gotten a bit carried away with himself.  The unquestioned king of Tolkien interpretation perhaps needed a bit of questioning.  It's definitely enjoyable.  A feast for the eyes filled with rich characterisation, and rip-roaring adventure.  The acting is fabulous, particularly from Martin Freeman's noble-but-amusing Bilbo, Stephen Fry's cringe-worthy Master of Laketown and Aidan Turner's unnaturally sexy dwarf Kili.

But, unlike the first instalment, I found myself getting slightly bored and distracted several times, wondering how much more of the film we had left.  This inevitably happened during action scenes.  Four minutes of beautifully coordinated fight scenes, river rafting in barrels or crazy escapes from a terrifying dragon is edge-of-the-seat stuff.  Seven gets tedious.  I got the feeling Jackson was having so much fun he just couldn't bring himself to trim.  He should have.  And saved the extended versions for the director's cut.

He takes far more liberties here than he has in any of the other films thus far, something we knew had to be coming when he announced he was turning the slim volume of The Hobbit into three films.  This is where opinion starts to divide, especially amongst those like the LOTRO community who know Tolkein's universe in depth.  ("The subtitles in that scene between Thranduil and Legolas didn't translate the Elvish properly, did they?" is real quote from our group's post-film discussion.)

As a humble fan who's only read the books twice, I understand Jackson's moves.

There's a lot of back story here about the rise of Sauron (the primary bad guy in The Lord of the Rings) that wasn't in The Hobbit, but makes perfect sense if you look forward to a time when people are going to be sitting down to watch six films in order.  Jackson's elaborations turn The Hobbit into more of a prequel than the almost stand-alone children's book it was.

The primary objections are to the invention of a new female Elvish character … Tauriel, the captain of the Elvish guard … and the inclusion of the Elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom's character), with a love triangle involving them and Kili.  Tolkien fanatics, particularly men, are left sputtering in amazement.  Unlike Jackson's other elaborations, this has nothing to do with deepening Tolkien's original intent.  How could he!  True.  But if you're a woman, it makes perfect sense.

And for this I'll forgive Jackson his over-long action scenes.  Because he's given me a brave, sexy, intelligent female character I can care about.  And some romance to balance all the adventure.  Personally, I'm looking forward to film three to see what happens to Tauriel far more than to see the dragon slaying and battles that are to come.

From wicked witches to Icelandic chefs, it's a week about confounding expectations

Restaurant review:  Texture (London), Reunion Bar (London)
Theatre review:  Wicked

Christmas merriment, part two.  We start with Agnar Sverrisson's Michelin-starred Texture.

Scandinavian cuisine continues its uber-trendiness, with Copenhagen's Noma retaining its lustre as the world's most desired restaurant table and the third UK TV chef in a year (this time, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall) about to do a cooking series from there.  Married to the half-Dane, I've been ahead of this curve, discovering gourmet delights in Copenhagen three years ago, attending family meals at Madsen's Scandi Kitchen (now sadly closed) and attempting some of my husband's favourite Danish dishes.  Despite the trendiness, London doesn't have that many Scandinavian restaurants.  Texture is, with its star, its elegant location on Portman Square and its TV-regular chef, undoubtably the poshest of them.

Given my personal ties to the cuisine I'd always wanted to try the place.  Christmas lunching with one of our design agencies provided the opportunity.

It is all that you'd expect from Michelin-starred dining.  Exquisite tastes, beautifully presented, in an elegant yet modern dining room with impeccable service.  What it was not was particularly distinctive, or noticeably Scandinavian.  Had you escorted me to the table blindfolded, I wouldn't have picked up the national flavour and wouldn't have found much to differentiate it from many other fine dining establishments doing modern European food from the classical tradition.  Except perhaps a lighter touch on sauces and ingredients that makes it easier to eat while watching the calories.  Sverrisson states in his menu that he does his best to avoid saturated fats in his starters and mains.  All I noted as obviously Scandinavian, besides that light touch, was wafer-thin rye bread served as crisps, an abundance of dill and assurance that the cod was from Iceland.

While it might not be distinctive, their £26.90 three-course set menu is a deal.  I started with a wonderfully delicate venison tartare, followed by that Icelandic cod done with Jerusalem artichoke and black truffle.  Dessert was the most inventive: white chocolate mousse and ice cream paired with dill and cucumber (pictured above).  The surprising accompaniment prevented the chocolate from being too sweet and brought a welcome freshness to the dish.

Far less delicate, and more rib-sticking, was an impressive array of canapés served as a pre-theatre dinner at the Reunion Bar at the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria.  This is one of those grand Edwardian places that are architectural monuments to Empire.  Walk into the lobby and you'll feel like organising India or taking over a small African country.  Walk up the processional staircase to the bar and you'll find a space with modern decor and amusing nods to grandeur.  We partied in an area with throne-like chairs and a grand canopy above us.

Fabulous service kept our champagne glasses constantly topped up and fresh nibbles appearing every few minutes.  Ironically, we probably ate and drank more in 90 minutes here than we would have at a "proper" dinner.  Certainly the mini Cornish pasties and the tempura prawns didn't do the diet any favours.  Petite rolls of rare roast beef around a sliver of fresh horseradish and a slice of heart of palm were suitably light, however, and worth trying at home.

The cocktail-party dining preceded the case study production team's outing to see the long-running Wicked.  I knew very little about the plot other than that it's a prequel to the Wizard of Oz that presents a surprising, alternative story to the assumptions you will have had from watching the original film.  Knowing any more than that, frankly, would spoil your enjoyment.  Because the story is marvellously clever.   The music is almost incidental, and other than one tune (Defying Gravity), not memorable.  It's really more of a play, and the lessons it teaches about not believing appearances, or official spin, are fabulous.  It would be an excellent outing with pre-teens; must keep in mind for the godson.
musical

Thus ends this year's holiday party season.  At least the work-related, expenses-fuelled season.  The personal weeks ahead will be quieter and less profligate.

The local shines, Loubet repeats, but it's the Mormons who make the week

Restaurant Reviews:  The Four Horseshoes (Sherfield-on-Loddon); Bistrot Bruno Loubet (London)

I had just settled into my seat on the London-bound train when I heard two girls arguing behind me.  They took the facing seats.  One had been crying.  A mousy, brown, frizzy-headed, blotchy complexioned young Englishwoman who hunched into herself and radiated low self esteem.  The other was a glossy-haired, bright-eyed, conservatively turned-out American girl who looked like she was channelling June Cleaver.

"You can't quit," the American girl pleaded.  "You can't leave me on my own.  Just come back to the
flat and we'll talk about it."  The English girl hunched further into herself and sniffled.

From the name tag at  the American's breastbone I realised these two were Mormon missionaries.  A bit of conversation confirmed my suspicions.  The American is the innocent abroad, a bit frightened but mostly enraptured by how different England is from her native Utah.  The English girl is the daughter of local Mormons, sent out on her mission much closer to home but not happy about it.

Soon, the American has the local president on her iPhone speaker, and they're both trying to convince the huddled one to face up to her responsibilities.  She may want to quit, the president says, but if she does it she needs to do so in an organised fashion, not just run away.

I was entranced by this little drama, and suddenly wondered:  Is someone going to start singing?  Maybe I'm in a flashmob, and they're filming a promo for Book of Mormon!  Surely life couldn't imitate art that much, could it?  Evidently so, as the girls got off at the next stop to return home.  I wish them well.

That little drama was actually the highlight of what was already quite an eventful week, the first of two packed with holiday festivity.  Other people worry about their caloric and alcohol intake over the holidays, my danger zone is always the last two working weeks of December, when agency lunches and department Christmas parties mean a fortnight of wedging work in-between the food and drink.  Maybe the Mormons should have been trying to convert me rather than arguing with themselves.  God knows, I'm hitting that deadly sin of gluttony hard at the moment.

The best meal of the week was with two colleagues at my local pub, The Four Horseshoes.  This was the copywriters' lunch.  The advent of a new chef has sent it from the worst of three pubs in our village to what I'd confidently say is the best gastropub in or around Basingstoke.  I've eaten there twice now and have been stunned by what's coming out of the kitchen.  Gourmet stuff at humble pub prices.  This week I started with a beautifully assembled beetroot and goat's cheese salad before going hard core with an obviously made-from-scratch venison pie.  And then on to the test of all fine pubs:  sticky toffee pudding.  Passed with flying colours.  Sadly, the atmosphere is almost the inverse of the food.  Though a charming old exterior, someone went cheap and cheerful in the past and it currently has the interior ambiance of a bus station cafe.  If the new management starts renovating the place to match the food, they'll be a force to be reckoned with.

The fact that this meal was as good as, if not better than, Friday's gourmet outing at Bistrot Bruno Loubet tells you I'm serious.  Loubet's place was nothing to sneeze at, however, repeating the quality I found there earlier this year.  The ingredients were certainly more gourmet and the wine list infinitely better.  This was the graphic designers' lunch.  I started with a terrine of Jerusalem artichoke and Corsican sheep's cheese with black olive oil.  It didn't quite live up to the interesting description, as that exotic-sounding cheese was really just like a drained ricotta turned a dark grey by the oil.  But the duck breast with a mulled wine sauce that followed, with its little side of a pastilla (a sweet and savoury pastry of North African origin) of confit duck leg and cranberries, was as delicious as it was seasonally festive.  The walnut, prune and armagnac tart looked good, but the flavours didn't differentiate themselves and, honestly, The Horseshoes' pudding would have taken this one in a fair fight.

Earlier in the week I'd had yet another delicious meal at the Lansdowne Club, where I provided access through my membership for the UK marketing ladies' dinner.  Here we combined the gourmet ambiance of Loubet with the value-for-money of The Horseshoes.  The beauty of a private club:  a holiday three-course menu for £20.  Of course, thanks to restaurant manager Erik's excellent help with the wine list, we spent almost double on wine what we did on food.  No surprises there.

The only place I easily resisted the gluttony challenge was an atmoshere-light party barn in The City called Gilt.  It was the UK marketing team Christmas party and, frankly, after years of recessionary bans on official gatherings, just being together was miraculous.  The official £20 per person kicked in by the company only stretched to platters of deep fried whatnots, easily resisted.  Because, after all, this had been planned by the team of recent graduates and they were saving the bulk of the cash for alcohol.  They show great potential.

Corporate largess was a bit more enjoyable at back-to-back meetings at the BT Tower.  Thursday
morning we got bacon butties and hearty mugs of coffee while we contemplated updates to the corporate visual identity.  Not distracted by the view, as it was so foggy we seemed to be floating in total isolation.  The next lunchtime, after yet another marketing session, we were treated to mulled wine, hand-crafted mince pies and views that stretched for miles in all directions.  Still grey, but definitely feeling a lot like Christmas.

One more week of partying left to go before I can even think of reformation.  Mormon or otherwise.

It's a tale of two turkeys at our holiday open house

Two years ago, as a new bride, I insisted on doing the full Thanksgiving feast.  Like most middle class  "foodies" in this country, we ordered a premium bird direct from a farm.  In our case, the celebrity chef endorsed Kelly Bronze.

The damned thing cost £70.  Yes, it was delicious.  But it got me wondering.  How much is really in the rearing, and how much is in the preparation?  Was I … a marketeer … simply paying out money for marketing?

I've been waiting for an excuse to experiment.  Our annual holiday open house was it.  We decided to lay on a Thanksgiving buffet, given how late the American holiday was this year.  Leftover turkey sandwiches with slices of cold stuffing and cranberry jelly.  Three kinds of home made bread (the unsung heroes of my table, I thought):  four-seed, sun-dried tomato and pumpernickel.  Pumpkin pie and chocolate pecan pie.  Turkey-shaped sugar cookies at a decorate-it-yourself bar for the kiddies.  Which worked a treat to entertain but did cause some nasty sugar-induced tantrums later in the day.  Sorry, parents.

But about that turkey.  No hand-reared, free-range, rare breeds here.  Just two frozen, plebeian birds from Sainsbury's … £17 each … subjected to gourmet preparation.

We brined both for 16 hours in a salt, herb, spice and onion bath.  Rinsed and dried, their paths diverged.  One with a French-inspired recipe, one TexMex.  We called them Pierre and Pedro.

Pierre got the oven roasting.  Propped upright on our beer-can roaster, but the can was filled with white wine rather than beer.  Next, I soaked a tea towel in a combo of melted butter and white wine and draped it over the bird.  The rest of the soaking liquid, plus 3 cups of chicken stock, went into the roasting pan.  I basted every half hour, and should have pulled the liquid-soaked tea towel off when the bird's thigh meat reached 140c.  The now-naked skin needed to crisp and brown as the bird came up its last 40 degrees.  (I hadn't anticipated how quickly our fan oven would cook the bird … less than two hours for a 4 kilo turkey … so didn't have enough time for crisping.  Lesson learned!)

Meanwhile, Pedro got the barbecue.  I slathered him with olive oil and mesquite seasoning and put him on the Weber, coals pushed to the side and a bath of beer (emptied from Pierre's can) and stock beneath him.  Similar basting every half hour.  Despite the different cooking methods, Pedro took almost exactly as long to cook as Pierre.  His skin was a luscious brown, as opposed to Pierre's pasty, teacloth-shrouded white.  Pedro, you could have carved at the table.  But Pierre tasted a bit better.

The oven/butter/beer can-with-white wine method, unsurprisingly, turned out really moist meat.  Pedro had an interesting smokey flavour, but he was also obviously dryer.  I'd do the oven method again exactly as described … except for pulling the cloth off sooner.  The barbecue still needs some experimenting, probably with fewer coals.

But the real question:  Did all that effort bring the £17 frozen bird up to the £70 gourmet model?  Not quite.  From what we remember (it was two years ago, after all), the pricey free range bird had a rich flavour the frozen boys didn't quite match.

Was that flavour difference worth £53?

Sorry, no.  I think I proved my point with Pierre and Pedro.  There's a lot of marketing in those English turkey prices.  Buy cheap and focus on your cooking technique, and you can close to a reasonable gap.