You guys, vacation food is the best kind of food in the world, cause it is delicious, nourishing AND an adventure! You don’t know what will come out on your plate, cause it’s food from a foreign place! Even when the foreign place is, like, Dallas, and mainly what comes out on your plate is subpar Tex-Mex. But luckily for me, I haven’t been in Dallas for the last two weeks! No, instead I’ve been in the UK, stuffing my face.

Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking. People always say that England doesn’t have great food. They say it’s bland and tasteless and just plain weird. I don’t get that, cause while I’m no fan of mushy peas myself (ick. Peas are gross to begin with and then mushing them? Hello, I have teeth, I do not eat mush.), pretty much all the food I eat in England is freaking tasty business. And because the only thing I like as much as eating food is thinking about food I have eaten, I am here to share it with you! With bullet points. And photos, cause that’s how I do.

ONE: The Sandwiches

One way in which the UK triumphs over the USA in the food department is the proliferation of perhaps the finest of fast foods: The Ready Made Sandwich. Heck, they even have an entire restaurant chain devoted to the concept. I love Ready Made Sandwiches. Although they can be a bit tricky (most sandwiches come my personal food nemesis, mayo, and it is always a fierce quest to find sandwiches without it), they can also be Tasty Ready Made Goodness, such as this smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich from Marks and Spencer:

Also, I like how I can put my Ready Made Sandwich in my purse, for consumption later*. You never know when you might be trapped somewhere, on the tube, at a bus stop, in a line to get into the dressing rooms at that Primark in Oxford Circus, which is a hellhole from which escape is nigh impossible, and you really just need a sandwich. Lucky for you, you have one READY MADE, in your bag.

* I do not actually recommend keeping a salmon sandwich on your person for any lengthy amount of time.

ALSO, in the UK, I can eat The Erin! Yeah, that’s right, I have a sandwich named after me!

The shop down the road from my friend Other Sarah’s house does baguettes, and the lady behind the counter named this one after me, cause I invented it. (well, it’s a sausage and mushroom baguette that I once ordered a few years ago but then asked, “could i have cheese on it?” and apparently the idea of a sausage, mushroom and cheese baguette is SO BIZARRE that they had no choice but to give me Intellectual Property rights over it.) I’ve ALWAYS wanted a sandwich named after me and NOW I HAVE ONE. Up next: fulfilling my life dream of being a D-list celebrity famous only for doing commentary on a VH1 pop culture show.

TWO: Pub Food

I’m not talking your standard fish and chips here, though that’s damn tasty, too, but rather the whole gastropub movement of the last few decades. If you’ve never been to one, imagine a pub that also serves RLY good food. (actually, just imagine Austin’s North by Northwest. and then imagine yourself buying me some dessert from there, plz, cause, yumz.) I love gastropubs cause they’re pretty, and quiet, and serve really awesome food AND drinks. In fact, it’d be good to live above one. I wonder if I could swing that with the UK visa commitee.

While in England and Scotland, I was lucky enough to eat at a few really good gastropubs, but two stood out in particular. I devoured this meal at a pub in Edinburgh – beef stew with handmade dumplings and sticky toffee pudding for dessert. Bonus? The beef stew came in a little pot. As you will see later on, I LOVE FOOD THAT COMES IN LITTLE POTS.

Just looking at it, I want to eat it again. Dumplings, come back to me!

Also, this meal, of a fishcake topped with poached egg and hollandaise over french green beans, was DELICIOUS. And it so happens that when consuming this meal, I was battling the Worst Hangover I Have Ever Suffered (TM), so if I thought it was tasty business even when the idea of food made me want to kill myself, imagine how good it REALLY was!

And, yes, I was still battling a hangover at dinner time. In fact, I kept battling it till about 3 am. That’s how bad it was. Stupid gin. And whiskey. And wine.

THREE: Cupcakes.

It wouldn’t be a day ending in Y if I weren’t baking, consuming, or thinking about baking or consuming cupcakes, and it certainly wouldn’t be a poshdeluxe blog without them! So friends, let me tell you about The Hummingbird Bakery in Notting Hill. It’s so cute and tiny! Check it:

And they have an impressive array of daily specials. I love daily specials. It’s like you get a treat, just cause it’s Tuesday, or whatever.

We visited the bakery on Sunday, so one of the daily specials was lime and poppyseed. I purchased one of those and one Red Velvet, to see how the bakery handled the standards.

The verdict? YUMMY ENGLISH CUPCAKES IN MY TUMMY. The lime and poppyseed was particularly delicious – a perfect balance between fruity and savory. I’ve set out to recreate it this summer in my own kitchen. YUM. So if you find yourself in Notting Hill (Matt G and Olivia, I do not believe you have a choice in this?), I highly recommend you stop in for some tasty cupcake business. And a cute little piggy bank!

And, while on the subject of desserts, check out some of the tasty ones I consumed on my trip:

There’s tiramisu and an espresso-and-chocolate coated ice cream and cranachan. You guys? Cranachan is possibly the best dessert ever to be invented. It’s toasted oats, raspberries, whiskey and double cream. I wonder if I could start eating it for breakfast. What? It has OATS in it.

FOUR: Wagamama

It would not be a trip to London without at least one gorging on noodles at Wagamama, and it certainly wouldn’t be a poshdeluxe post without the mandatory Eating Of Noodles photo.

These were the noodles I was consuming!

And these were the very tasty duck gyoza (I often wake up dreaming of Wagamama’s duck gyoza, and I’m not sure what that says about me) and the delicious chili squid:

Would it be weird to travel to Boston or DC just to go to Wagamama? Maybe if I threw in a trip to H&M, too?

FIVE: Gordon {Bleepin’} Ramsey

My friend Courtney, with whom I travelled to the UK, asked me if I wanted to eat at a Gordon Ramsey restaurant, since she’d always wanted to go to one. DID I? The only thing I enjoy more than eating delicious food or thinking about delicious food I’ve eaten is eating delicious food and having someone insulting me while I’m doing it, so I WAS TOTALLY DOWN. Unfortunately, Gordon wasn’t there (too busy selling off his restaurants, I think), so no one called me a “{bleeping} donkey,” BUT I still got to eat flippin’ delicious food, and now I get to think about the delicious food I ate, so I consider it a win.

We went to eat at the York & Albany, which is a hotel in Camden whose restaurant is owned by Mr Ramsey. We chose the three-course prix fix lunch menu (only 18 pounds! we’re pretty cheap dates.):

First up? Roasted tomato gazpacho.

Look! It comes in its own little copper pot!! On a cutting board, with fresh mozzarella on the side! OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. It was so delicious. We were cheerfully talking away until the first course arrived; we each took the first sip and then made a sort of strangled, happy moaning noise in unison. The gazpacho was light and just this side of creamy, with flavored oil drizzled on top and salted slivers of roasted almonds there to provide contrast. Satisfying, but not filling, which is the raison d’etre of a first course, and something most restaurants can’t seem to get right.

Next up? For me, it was the roasted sea trout:

Oh, man, you’ll have to bear with me for a second, but seeing that photo just made my tongue remember how the perfectly cooked trout flaked off and mingled with the briny capers and olives, balanced out by the freshness of the homemade tartar sauce (made with some sort of soft cheese, like a mascarpone. it wasn’t mascarpone, though.). And now my tongue is sad it can’t eat that meal ever again. SO GOOD.

My friends Courtney and Sarah chose the other option – roasted leg and breast of chicken on potatoes with spinach puree. I didn’t try any, but judging from the way their eyes rolled back in their heads, I think it was pretty good:

For dessert, I chose the treacle tart with homemade yogurt sorbet.

I LOVE TREACLE TART!!! And this was perfect – smooth and sweet, without being cloying, with a crust that made me want to weep. And the sorbet balanced it perfectly – and made me start saving pennies for a good ice cream maker for my house.

Sarah and Courtney again chose to go a different route (which is good, cause it means I get to taste it!) and ordered the chocolate brownie with black cherries and vanilla bean mousse.

One bite of that and I was in some sort of chocolate nirvana, although I’m glad I didn’t order it because the one bite perfectly satisfied my chocolate cravings for a month (I don’t hate chocolate, but I don’t have an all-consuming love for it, either.). It was delicious, though, and that mousse was sinful.

AND we even got little apple fritters at the end! I neglected to mention that we also got bread at the beginning of the meal, for FREE, which has never happened to me in the UK. My friend Sarah was so confused by it – “they’re not going to charge us? really?”

So, THANK YOU, Gordon Ramsey, for one of the best meals of my life. Please stop selling off your restaurants.

There were many, many other meals, obvs, during the two weeks, but these were the highlights. (And there WERE some lowlights, trust.) If you’re interested in reading about the non-food parts, I’m writing about it all (slowly but surely) in my own blog, likepenguins. Although I warn you, it’s less pictures of food, and more pictures of, like, sheep.

I will leave you with this thought, pantsworld: the food in the UK can be so sinfully good that even the soup is lascivious.

You should go. Eat an adventure.

Hey, pantsworld!  It’s guest blogger erin with the little e here again.  Our most excellent host, miz poshdeluxe, asked me to wax rhapsodic about sxsw, which is just!around!the!corner!

This is maybe the first year in the history of ever that I am approaching the 5 day magical time known as the music portion of south by without a plan of attack.  You guys know that movie The Wedding Planner, in which J. Lo plays a crazy, Type A wedding planner (natch) who has everything in her life cross-referenced, color-coded and backed up with several alternate plans of attack?  I’m totally that person, only about south by southwest instead of weddings.  (Okay, I’m also that person when it comes to weddings.  Just ask any of my friends who are currently engaged.)  I usually start planning my schedule around November, when the early buzz starts leaking, and I triple-check artists’ myspaces and websites, facebooks and blogs, in order to form a more perfect schedule with several options for every waking hour.

But not this year!  Because I have a job which makes me work pretty much all the time these days, I haven’t had a chance to even discover new bands this year, much less build an elaborate flowchart which carefully positions said new band in between catching an established act and breaking for a grilled mozzarella sandwich from Go Bites.

This year, all is fair game!  Instead of my careful planning and cross-planning, I went to sxsw sched and went down the list of parties and artists, checking off the ones I was interested in seeing. I came up with this, and it’s this that I’m going to use in the most laid-back style possible (which is, for me, admittedly not all that laid-back). When the 8 pm hour comes on Thursday evening, I’ll just have to decide who suits my mood most: Frank Turner, Airborne Toxic Event, M Ward or Gabriella Cilmi. Actually, I can already decide this one. I’ll have seen M Ward, with any luck, on Wednesday; I’ve seen Airborne Toxic Event before, and Gabriella Cilmi isn’t as hot as Frank Turner. See? That’s a pretty easy decision.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the number one problem with scheduling: having a wristband and being denied access to a show you really want to see. That’s why it’s always good to have one or two venues as your own personal “Cheers,” i.e. a place where everyone knows your name, and you have at least a passing interest in most of the acts playing. That venue for me is Latitude 30, site of the British Embassy’s nightly showcase and most logical place to find people I know. And possibly Strongbow.

The simple truth of the matter is that, for music fans at south by, there’s really no reason to make a schedule or worry a bit. The glory of south by southwest is that there’s music every which way you turn: polished or rough or earnest or breathtaking or disappointing or insane. Last year, I passed a young man who turned to his companion and exclaimed with wide-eyed wonder, “There’s music EVERYWHERE.” Even as I laughed off his adorable naivete, I smiled and inwardly agreed with him. I love this week; I love the crush of bodies and the desperation of bands looking to make a mark, the hum of amps and the twang of guitars, all melting together to slick the streets and season the air with the rhythm, the chorus, of the most wonderful week of the year.

See you down the front, pantsworld!

Colin Firth, doing what he does best: playing Mr Darcy.

1. Even if you’re not ready to profess your ardent love and admiration for your sweetie, go on and on about her fine eyes (or nose or ears or hair or whatever) to any bitter old hags you know.
2. Avoid the friends and family members you can’t stomach, and treat the ones you like with jovial good humor and a great deal of respect.
3. Look good in a waistcoat.  Or, barring that, at least change out of jeans and a hoodie every once in a while.
4. Make dry, witty asides which force your sweetie to acknowledge that even though you’re still a rude, pompous jerkface, you’re a pretty funny one.
5. Do what you can to make the people she loves happy.  Everyone feels better when their friends and family are happy.
6. If your sweetie rejects you, drop it and don’t bring it up again unless the circumstances of your relationship have changed so vastly as to make you think you have a real shot.
7. Dance with her.  Even if you hate to dance.  Especially if you hate to dance.
8. Don’t always agree with her.  That’s boring.  Argue all you want, but listen to what she has to say.
9. If all that fails, win the lottery or knock over a bank.  Hey, these are hard times, my friends.  Even Lizzie Bennett admits that the grandeur of Pemberley was a swaying factor in her love for Darcy.
10. And above all else, realize that she will never give up her infatuation with Mr Darcy.  So when she’s having a bad day, bring her a drink and a blanket and Pride and Prejudice.  The bonus to this is that while she’s recuperating and inwardly squeeing that she has such a kind, understanding boyfriend, you can be playing Mario Kart on the Wii.  Everyone wins!