My husband is great
Jan. 15th, 2018 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo my excellent jack turned 36 last week. Since we've been together nearly ten years, I realize we were kind of impossibly young when we started dating. And I really really could not have imagined that we'd be celebrating such a big number birthday together, as a married couple who own a house together.
I also couldn't have imagined choosing to go out for dinner in a fancy restaurant: Alimentum. Well, actually I'm surprised by Alimentum too; we went there early on in the relationship soon after it first opened, but back then we slightly balked at paying £30 a head. And since then, we've got more extravagant in our habits and for a while we felt that Alimentum wasn't enough better than a good gastropub to justify the price, especially not for veggies. But Alimentum has come up in the world since then; they now have a tasting menu for £80 a head not including wine, and lots of our friends who are more serious foodies recommended it as exciting enough to justify the price.
The meal did not disappoint. If anything it peaked too early: the first substantial course was about the most amazing thing I've ever eaten, and the rest didn't quite live up to that. The menu describes it as 'beetroot, goats cheese and lovage' which doesn't tell you much. There was a whole roast beetroot, which could easily be boring, but was actually an example of a single, unadorned vegetable being as exciting as a cut of meat. It was slightly caramelized, and the beetroot flavour and the texture were just perfect. The goats cheese was in a sort of cigar with a coating between soft and hard, between sweet and savoury. There were some crumbs of savoury flapjack providing a texture contrast. And to cut the almost but not quite excessive sweetness of beet and goats cheese and granola, there was a small scoop of lovage sorbet, and a tiny thin slice of pickled beetroot, cold and bitter and really perfect with the other components.
The other savoury courses were potato and truffle soup, with little cubes of very potato-y potato; something with cubes of caramelized turnip and slices of apple which I think was trying to be meat-like but didn't quite work for me; a dish based on roast cauliflower which is what a lot of the trendy places are doing these days as a vegetarian main, and I'm not a big fan of cauliflower but it was undeniably excellent; and spinach and mushroom risotto, which made us laugh because when we regarded Alimentum as not good value for money, we used to complain that all they had to offer veggies was mushroom risotto, and even the best mushroom risotto doesn't feel like a fancy restaurant treat. I feel much less hard done by when it was one of seven courses, but still, it sat opposite what would have been the entrée in the meat menu, and I feel like risotto just isn't the equivalent of a really nice cut of meat.
Several really good desserts: a gin and tonic sorbet like the oneghoti_mhic_uait made at one of her dinner parties, which worked well considering I don't like gin, tonic or cucumber. A deconstructed black forest gateau which was just amazingly rich, with caramel and meringue and some kind of kirsch flavoured ganache and really intense chocolate. And a really cute Battenberg that exactly mirrored the outstanding beetroot dish: a pink cube of cake, a cigar with creamy filling, sweet instead of savoury flapjack, and lots of amaretto. Finally some outstandingly great petits fours: pistachio nougat, caramel truffle, saffron turkish delight and dark chocolate with liquorice, which were served in cute little treasure chest on a bed of cocoa flakes. Edible flakes...
Since it was the middle of the week, we decided to have a bottle of wine between us rather than a wine flight. And the waiter was helpful at dealing with the ridiculously long wine list. I said I felt like a fairly light white along the lines of a classic Loire, and he recommended some New World wines in a similar sort of space, and we ended up with a dry Riesling, which I'm not sure is quite what I was looking for but it certainly wasn't bad. I like dry wines, and this was very dry, just the right side of acidic. I forgot to note it down but I think I won't seek it out again. It worked with the meal, but I wasn't wild about it.
The service was pleasant. Unexceptional, I suppose; the thing about having a tasting menu is that there were almost no delays, so it was up to the tact of the waiters to bring out the next course such that we were neither rushed nor bored. They gave us a card at the end asking us to rate the food, service and ambience, which made me realize I kind of don't care for the ambience. The décor looks slightly like a hotel lobby, albeit an upmarket hotel lobby. And the background music, sort of lo-fi jazz stuff, was louder than I'd like and the lighting dimmer than I'd like. But I think most people who are not me prefer louder and darker restaurants.
The next day I spent the evening playing with OSOs and their kids, and left a bit later than I'd planned due to getting absorbed in a game of Roll Through the Ages, and had a minor disaster getting home. I managed to jam my bike lock somehow, and broke the key off in the lock. And I didn't want to disturb partners who were pretty much going straight to bed after I left, so I hoped I could get the bike home on my own, as I'd only locked the wheel to the frame and it wasn't attached to anything. It turns out that dragging / carrying a bike over a mile or so with the wheel locked is a pretty unpleasant experience. I got the lock tangled in the spokes somehow, and my lungs were protesting at the cold damp air, and it took ages. I stumbled through the gate just before midnight, at which point a random down on his luck young man approached me and asked for money or to speak to my husband.
I was in a pretty awful state by that point, struggling to breathe and exhausted and worried about the consequences of a non-functional bike and not far off a panic attack, so I had zero spare capacity for either being compassionate to a beggar, or sufficiently assertive in telling him that midnight is too late to importune strangers. And I was scared that he would follow me into the house, and probably he wasn't aggressive but I was really out of it. Thenjack showed up and fixed everything.
He dealt with the beggar, he dealt with getting my broken bike into the shed and me into the warm house. He coped with the fact that I was more or less in hysterics by this point, crying too much to speak coherently, and upset with myself for being so upset over such a minor thing as a broken bike. He didn't overreact, he gathered that there was no immediate crisis just that I was tired and upset. And he calmed me down with tea and hugs enough that we could actually get to sleep at a not too ridiculous time. And then in the morning, my amazing husband went out to the shed, poked at the bike and managed to pull the broken key out of the lock and disentangle the chain from the wheel and made my bike rideable again in time to get to work.
Ten years ago I had no idea that my boyfriend was going to turn out to be so competent, both practically and emotionally, in a crisis. I always knew I could rely on him to support me as best as he could, but he's acquired so many skills in the intervening decade and got really good at supporting me.
So yes, happy birthday to my excellent husband. Thank you for being a brilliant dinner companion and an ideal housemate and a hero when I need you and generally making my life better in so many ways.
jack turned 36 last week. Since we've been together nearly ten years, I realize we were kind of impossibly young when we started dating. And I really really could not have imagined that we'd be celebrating such a big number birthday together, as a married couple who own a house together. I also couldn't have imagined choosing to go out for dinner in a fancy restaurant: Alimentum. Well, actually I'm surprised by Alimentum too; we went there early on in the relationship soon after it first opened, but back then we slightly balked at paying £30 a head. And since then, we've got more extravagant in our habits and for a while we felt that Alimentum wasn't enough better than a good gastropub to justify the price, especially not for veggies. But Alimentum has come up in the world since then; they now have a tasting menu for £80 a head not including wine, and lots of our friends who are more serious foodies recommended it as exciting enough to justify the price.
The meal did not disappoint. If anything it peaked too early: the first substantial course was about the most amazing thing I've ever eaten, and the rest didn't quite live up to that. The menu describes it as 'beetroot, goats cheese and lovage' which doesn't tell you much. There was a whole roast beetroot, which could easily be boring, but was actually an example of a single, unadorned vegetable being as exciting as a cut of meat. It was slightly caramelized, and the beetroot flavour and the texture were just perfect. The goats cheese was in a sort of cigar with a coating between soft and hard, between sweet and savoury. There were some crumbs of savoury flapjack providing a texture contrast. And to cut the almost but not quite excessive sweetness of beet and goats cheese and granola, there was a small scoop of lovage sorbet, and a tiny thin slice of pickled beetroot, cold and bitter and really perfect with the other components.
The other savoury courses were potato and truffle soup, with little cubes of very potato-y potato; something with cubes of caramelized turnip and slices of apple which I think was trying to be meat-like but didn't quite work for me; a dish based on roast cauliflower which is what a lot of the trendy places are doing these days as a vegetarian main, and I'm not a big fan of cauliflower but it was undeniably excellent; and spinach and mushroom risotto, which made us laugh because when we regarded Alimentum as not good value for money, we used to complain that all they had to offer veggies was mushroom risotto, and even the best mushroom risotto doesn't feel like a fancy restaurant treat. I feel much less hard done by when it was one of seven courses, but still, it sat opposite what would have been the entrée in the meat menu, and I feel like risotto just isn't the equivalent of a really nice cut of meat.
Several really good desserts: a gin and tonic sorbet like the one
ghoti_mhic_uait made at one of her dinner parties, which worked well considering I don't like gin, tonic or cucumber. A deconstructed black forest gateau which was just amazingly rich, with caramel and meringue and some kind of kirsch flavoured ganache and really intense chocolate. And a really cute Battenberg that exactly mirrored the outstanding beetroot dish: a pink cube of cake, a cigar with creamy filling, sweet instead of savoury flapjack, and lots of amaretto. Finally some outstandingly great petits fours: pistachio nougat, caramel truffle, saffron turkish delight and dark chocolate with liquorice, which were served in cute little treasure chest on a bed of cocoa flakes. Edible flakes...Since it was the middle of the week, we decided to have a bottle of wine between us rather than a wine flight. And the waiter was helpful at dealing with the ridiculously long wine list. I said I felt like a fairly light white along the lines of a classic Loire, and he recommended some New World wines in a similar sort of space, and we ended up with a dry Riesling, which I'm not sure is quite what I was looking for but it certainly wasn't bad. I like dry wines, and this was very dry, just the right side of acidic. I forgot to note it down but I think I won't seek it out again. It worked with the meal, but I wasn't wild about it.
The service was pleasant. Unexceptional, I suppose; the thing about having a tasting menu is that there were almost no delays, so it was up to the tact of the waiters to bring out the next course such that we were neither rushed nor bored. They gave us a card at the end asking us to rate the food, service and ambience, which made me realize I kind of don't care for the ambience. The décor looks slightly like a hotel lobby, albeit an upmarket hotel lobby. And the background music, sort of lo-fi jazz stuff, was louder than I'd like and the lighting dimmer than I'd like. But I think most people who are not me prefer louder and darker restaurants.
The next day I spent the evening playing with OSOs and their kids, and left a bit later than I'd planned due to getting absorbed in a game of Roll Through the Ages, and had a minor disaster getting home. I managed to jam my bike lock somehow, and broke the key off in the lock. And I didn't want to disturb partners who were pretty much going straight to bed after I left, so I hoped I could get the bike home on my own, as I'd only locked the wheel to the frame and it wasn't attached to anything. It turns out that dragging / carrying a bike over a mile or so with the wheel locked is a pretty unpleasant experience. I got the lock tangled in the spokes somehow, and my lungs were protesting at the cold damp air, and it took ages. I stumbled through the gate just before midnight, at which point a random down on his luck young man approached me and asked for money or to speak to my husband.
I was in a pretty awful state by that point, struggling to breathe and exhausted and worried about the consequences of a non-functional bike and not far off a panic attack, so I had zero spare capacity for either being compassionate to a beggar, or sufficiently assertive in telling him that midnight is too late to importune strangers. And I was scared that he would follow me into the house, and probably he wasn't aggressive but I was really out of it. Then
jack showed up and fixed everything. He dealt with the beggar, he dealt with getting my broken bike into the shed and me into the warm house. He coped with the fact that I was more or less in hysterics by this point, crying too much to speak coherently, and upset with myself for being so upset over such a minor thing as a broken bike. He didn't overreact, he gathered that there was no immediate crisis just that I was tired and upset. And he calmed me down with tea and hugs enough that we could actually get to sleep at a not too ridiculous time. And then in the morning, my amazing husband went out to the shed, poked at the bike and managed to pull the broken key out of the lock and disentangle the chain from the wheel and made my bike rideable again in time to get to work.
Ten years ago I had no idea that my boyfriend was going to turn out to be so competent, both practically and emotionally, in a crisis. I always knew I could rely on him to support me as best as he could, but he's acquired so many skills in the intervening decade and got really good at supporting me.
So yes, happy birthday to my excellent husband. Thank you for being a brilliant dinner companion and an ideal housemate and a hero when I need you and generally making my life better in so many ways.
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