Pump Street Bakery

Hello everybody,

When we lived in New York, one of our favourite weekend pastimes was to have brunch.  There are so many places for this in Manhattan, ranging from chi chi restaurants with massive queues outside to old school diners where everything is supersized and you don't need to eat for a week afterwards.

So, I was a bit worried when we decamped to the house by the sea that we'd have nowhere to get our weekly fix of excellent coffee and tasty treats while we flicked through the sunday papers.  I need not have fretted.  Because not very far from where we live is the lovely and amazing Pump Street Bakery.

You know you're in trouble when even the lighting excites you

Their sourdough bread is just delicious, and they do a fab bacon rocket and lemon mayo bap.  Their savoury snacks really are good - fresh ingredients, locally sourced, with perfectly balanced flavours.

But the real treats, the things that keep us going back there time after time, are the sweet treats.  Doughnuts filled with jams - rhubarb or raspberry - or creme anglaise, or brownies or meringues.  Eccles cakes don't normally have me salivating at the sight of them, but one bite of these and I was hooked.  Every time I go, I debate whether to have an Eccles cake or a Portuguese nata (I'm a sucker for custard...)

There's a fire in winter and outside seating in the summer months.  And the simple decor perfectly complements the good simple food...

But the best bit for me is Cedric.

From Wednesdays to Sundays, Cedric can be found around and about, selling bread and treats to those who can't make it to the bakery.

So, you see, I needn't have worried.  Brunch is taken care of wherever we are.

And you needn't take my word for how good Pump Street is.  The bakery has a finalist in the BBC's Food and Farming Awards.  Hope it wins.

C.x

ps I have no affiliation with Pump Street Bakery.  I just like their stuff!

A day of plenty

Hello there,

Firstly, thank you for all your lovely comments on my last post.  In the (too long) break from blogging, I pretty much stopped taking photos at all, but in coming back to the fold I realise just how much I enjoy it, and how important a part of blogging it is for me.  Taking photographs makes me really see things and I love it.

Secondly, welcome, welcome to my new followers.  It's lovely to have you here.

So, today, I have lots more photos of a market.  Because finally, I have uploaded my images of the vintage market I went to recently in Woodbridge.  Oh, my!  You know there are some days when you visit a flea market or vintage fair, when you traipse around scanning ahead from stall to stall and reach the end and wish you hadn't bothered?  Well, this was the exact opposite of all that.
  

It fell on a crisp clear day a couple of weeks ago and wandering around felt like being in the South of France.  Yes, really.

And even as I look through these photos, I see all sorts of things that I somehow missed ,and want to go back to.  But before you feel too sorry for the opportunity lost, let me show you what I DID buy....

I started slowly with this sweet little dish, made of Welsh pottery.  Love the flowers.  Love the dots.  Love everything about it really.  (And it didn't cost a lot.)

Then I spied these two lurking in the shadows.  No House by the Sea should be without them.

Then I happened upon a stall selling tiles made locally in the 1950s in my favourite colour of the moment.  (Can't seem to get enough of mustard...). 

By this point I was giving myself a stern talking to about the Age of Austerity ruling in the House of NKK etc, but the woman in the bird's nest hat simply smiled.

And that was my final purchase.  Final final.  Until I saw this.

Really, I shouldn't be let out.  Clearly, I cannot be trusted.  But in my defence, I defy any of you to have walked away without this beautiful blanket.  I know I should just have gone home and whipped one up myself.  But we all know how long that's going to take...  And this is made of pure wool.  And in such lovely colours.  And I couldn't buy more than a few of balls of yarn for the price I paid for it.  So really, it absolutely had to come home with me.  Don't you think?

So, now I need some advice, please.  As you can see, it's a little too small for our stupidly big bed (for which, I have Mr. P to thank).  And I am wondering about the best way to add to it.  I know I could just add to the border.  Or I could make granny squares in a single colour (probably either red or navy to tie the room together (in a non matchy match way, hopefully) and sew these in a sort of mega border around the outside, expanding the blanket by a granny square width all around, which I think might do the trick.  

What do you think?

C.x

PS the lovely Rebecca from Posh Yarn was there and I chatted briefly but then ran away in a fit of shyness (more of that another day).  Sorry.

Treasure at every turn

Hello everyone,

Thanks so much for all your lovely comments on my iPad case.  I'm glad you picked up on the temptation to sling it in the back of a cupboard.  I just couldn't find a cupboard deep enough to stop the nagging voice that I could figure it out if only I tried hard enough.  Nothing if not dogged...

Anyway, I am back from my travels, safe and sound.  I would love to tell you about all the great things I saw and did, but I spent a week going from compound to compound and not seeing anything more exciting than airports (of the non-glamourous variety) so nothing much to report there. 

But we have had a lovely long weekend here with Memorial Day so, when I wasn't sleeping, I was out and about, enjoying having Mr. P back with me, and generally making the most of a hot weather weekend (it finally stopped raining...). 

And I have treasure to show you.  First up, this fab leather footstool bought for a song at my local flea market. 

Isn't it just the business!  I LOVE the colour.  (Anthropologie has a beautiful club chair in just this shade of green leather with each button covered in a different fabric that I have been coveting for the longest time.  In truth, a green chair might be too much, but the footstool is just perfect...)  And it really brings out the green in the faded old cushion cover from Designers Guild that I've had forever.  And it's got those great metal tips to the legs.  We found it at the end of a trudge through the market in the very last stall.  Exactly the kind of thing that keeps me going back week after week.

(We will draw a veil over the fiasco that was the Manchester United v Barcelona match, watched after we found the stool.  Nuff said...)

I left Mr. P. hiding from the heat on Sunday to go back to the Brooklyn Flea.  Treasure at every turn.  A Royal Denmark vase...

... and a partner for my other tapestry picture bought there a few weeks ago.  (I sense a collection in the making...)

... and this lovely Arabia marmalade jar.  (I saw one when I was in Australia but left it behind and it has been nagging at me ever since, but if anything this one is even better with its gold accents...)

And finally, this lovely bowl bought in a charity shop for $1 last night.

This weekend, I am promising myself not to go to any more flea markets.  There's no end...

C.x

Loving catching up on all you blogs.  I missed them while I was away.

Madison Square Park

This weekend was all about staying indoors out of the rain and generally moping around.  But I still haven't told you about the perfection of last Sunday, when the sky was blue and Mr. P. and I meandered down to one of our favourite parts of the city.  Madison Square Park lies on 23rd Street, where 5th Avenue and Broadway converge.  It's also next to one of my favourite buildings in the whole city.  I don't know how many photos of Flatiron I've taken over the years, but I can't be near it without trying to capture its magnificence.

The park was packed because there was a food festival going on...

... complete with a stall that made ice lollies the old fashioned way, sprinkling cordial over the shavings of a glistening iceberg....

But we weren't there for the food festival.  

New Yorkers are an impatient bunch as a rule.  They don't wait for anything.  But, rain or shine, they wait for Shake Shack...

... Which gives everyone time to admire the blousy tulips...

... and the calming hydrangeas...

... and make new friends...

Though even he got a bit bored in the end...

But, finally, we made it to the top of the queue and scarfed down burgers and shakes with the best of them.  

And afterwards, through the trees, we came across this fabulous creation...

It's by Jaume Plensa and is called Echo.  He took as his inspiration a 9 year old neighbour of his in Barcelona.  I can't tell you what an electrifying thing it is to see amid the buildings all around the Square and the people milling around.

It's made even more impressive by its 44ft height.

Just breathtaking.  And the perfect, tranquil end to a busy, happy day.

C.x

When only a pork pie will do

We love living in Manhattan.  Five minutes from our door there's a row of restaurants selling pretty much every cuisine under the sun.  We are utterly spoilt for choice when it comes to eating out, and the only taxing part is the choosing, and having the discipline to stay in once in awhile... 

But every now and again, maybe on a cold or rainy day, or maybe when one of us is feeling a bit homesick, or maybe just for the hell of it as we did last Sunday, we will find ourselves by 'accident' in the West Village at a shop on Hudson Street that's done out like a 1950s English grocers.

Forever England...

To give you an idea of the kind of territory we're in, the West Village is not just any old run of the mill neighbourhood; the grocery shop is a couple of streets away from this:

We're talking seriously chi-chi.  But Myers of Keswick is resolutely, self-consciously, old world.

I could tell you we go there for the tea...

... or the sweets we used to eat as children...



 ...or the rather fab brown betty teapots...

... or the inevitable tins of beans...

... or the syrup and treacle....


...but none of that is quite it really.  We have our own private dance in this shop, Mr. P and I, where I will tell him that I'm there for the Fairy Liquid (I find the washing up liquid here a bit cloying) and he will tell me that he's there for the marmite.  But we both know why he's really there.  And that's just fine.

Me?  I'm there for the custard....

(And just in case you're curious, we have no affiliation with the store, but I really feel we should have.  For the amount we spend in there, we must be entitled to some shares by now...)

C.x