growing up

was meant to be coming into one's own, dealing with crazy appetites and banishing bad habits like gluttony. in some ways, i feel very grown up with my spouse and my house. and in other ways (especially when soft cheese and alcohol is involved) i feel like an overindulged child with absolutely no self-restraint. denial of self and discipline seems to be fairly reasonable standards to work towards, but i'm still falling very far short. doesn't help that the mister is ever-resourceful, sniffs out the best deals (sometimes two at a time) and is keen to try anything and everything come restaurant week. he's miraculously managed to book us double lunch (!) and double dinner (!!) most weekends and there comes a point when i've to put my foot down and slowly explain why stuffing ourselves silly isn't the best of ideas. and i'm the one with no self-restraint! 

having whittled down "the original plan" to something a little more manageable, we were excited to finally try champagne+fromage near the lyceum. what the mister had sold me as a "light dinner of cheese and champers" was no longer so light when you factored in just how much cheese and champers there was. oh, and he forgot to add that there was dessert! i think it was a valiantly enjoyable effort to demolish* one cheese plate (finished before above photo was taken), one charcuterie plate, two baked camemberts and an egg and foie gras cocotte. we washed it all down with six full flutes of grower's champagne and a bottle of vintage champagne for good measure. and then there was a massive dessert course. we'd the chocolate fondant oozing with more cheese (i know right!) and a brick of raspberry tiramisu. you'd think the champagne would've acted as a lipase and digested most of the cheese for us, but no such luck. we left making empty promises not to eat for the week after (didn't happen) and a little more rounder than when we walked in.

*in the interest of full disclosure, we packed the bread (all the cheese plates came with mountains of amazing french bread**) and some of the ham to go. and the mister, bless him, shared it with a beggar on the bridge. if we 1) weren't already married 2) i wasn't a male chauvanist, i'd have dropped on one knee and proposed right there and then. oh the mister, he makes my heart swell :)

**one thing london lacks is good water to make good bread. all the decent bread we've had so far has been made in france and carted over in the morning. who knew?!