Sober up

Beth and I went for lunch with the boys yesterday in celebration of GBBF (gay boy best friend) Richard's birthday.

We went to Roast in Borough Market where we dined on potted salt beef, scotch eggs, oysters, guinea fowl, partridge, pork belly, Goosnargh chicken, potatoes cooked in beef dripping, kale with garlic, spinach with pine nuts, English cheeses, damson Queen of puddings, chocolate banoffee pudding, apple and blackberry crumble, whisky and gin cocktails, champagne, English sparkling wine, bottles of Bordeaux, Sauternes, maraschino liqueur, port and sloe gin. It was seriously decadent!

Being an intelligent bunch - consisting of a psychiatrist, an operations manager, a lawyer, a journalist and a government policy adviser - the conversation flowed with the wine and led on to discussions about the X Factor, licking dogs, spotting the fellow gays in the restaurant, how St Paul's Cathedral looks like a big breast (we could see it from our table), how one of our set of parents are currently hob-nobbing with the lesbian sex shop owners down their local golf club, Dynasty, Dollywood, Lip Service, our individual voting records (why do I have so many friends who vote Tory when I am a die hard Labourite?), the Spending Review, siblings, the benefits of Valium on a flight, men visiting the club buffet after coming out of the dark room at XXL (urrrgh!), school days, how drinks and mixers are so much better served in the US (always crushed ice, never cubed), Oxford vs Cambridge university and can men and women ever really be friends, a la When Harry met Sally.

The answer to that last question is yes, if both the male and female in question are gay. Both Beth and I have GBBFs as do many of our Sapphic sisters. You see, in this situation the GBBFs don't need to deal with all that unrequited love which often occurs with fag hags and us gay girls don't have to deal with our heterosexual male 'dikey likeys' having secret lascivious thoughts about us. It can really fuck up a friendship if you subsequently find out that someone is harbouring romantic feelings and has some misguided belief that you would reciprocate and change sexuality if they just tried it on. It doesn't work like that, being gay is not a choice!

After lunch and two drinks in a pub by the Millennium Bridge, the lightweight boys went home, whilst Beth and I carried on down to the Retro Bar for a chaser and then on to the vigil against hate crime in Trafalgar Square. We heard the inspiring Stuart Milk speak (nephew of Harvey) and cried when they read out the names of LGBT people who have died as the result of hate crime in the past ten years. A sobering end to a not so sober day.

Girl on Grill Action

I love a good barbecue. I jump at any opportunity to start creating inventive marinades or rubs, slathering them on fine cuts of meat and then whacking them on the grill. The smell of of the meat and sauce marrying together over hot coals gives me an immense sense of pleasure.

Am I the only person who gets excited perusing the vast array of barbecue sauces on the market today? There are so many to choose from! My personal favourite is Cattlemen's, which can be purchased in Sainsbury's or Waitrose. I get equally excited about salad dressings. Try Brianna's Rich Poppy Seed, if you can find it.

Of course, barbecues can also go woefully wrong. This can be the case if you use inferior cuts of meat or frozen burgers and sausages. They just lack the depth of flavour that comes with finer cuts, quality ground beef or speciality sausages.

There are a vast array of things you can cook on a grill, and not all meat based. You can make souvlaki, BBQ maple ribs, grilled sweetcorn with butter and chilli flakes, citrus monkfish, halloumi, blue cheese burgers...the list goes on.

One of my finest memories involves a barbecue. Beth, our friends and I had just arrived at the Moonshine Cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains at the start of our holiday to Dollywood and Nashville. As a pinky orange sun was setting over the horizon, we cracked open some ice cold bottles of local beer, got the hot tub going and struck up the grill. We ate our charcol grilled steaks with salad whilst the eagles flew in the distance and Johnny Cash played on the stereo. Can it get any better?

G-Cups and Sauces

I'm currently counting down to Next Saturday, a big day in our calendar.

Because we're two gay girls living in London you'd assume that I'm referring to the annual Gay Pride celebrations, but no. You see, there's one thing (in fact, you could say two things) forgiveably bigger than Gay Pride for us gay girls, and for those gay boys too.

Dolly Parton. Singing her heart out in venues throughout the UK this week, she'll be performing at the O2 at the weekend and we're going to see her on Saturday night. We saw her in concert last March at Wembley and instantly got hooked on the Dolly drug, ravenously consuming her extensive back catalogue, her film repertoire and her autobiography over the subsequent months. In fact, the hunger was so great that it had us heading to Dollywood and Nashville last autumn. Does this make us sound like obsessive fans? I guess it does, and admittedly at times like this week we probably are.

So, to honour our hunger for all things Dolly and mark the countdown to Dolly Day, Charlotte and I will be having a week full of Dolly Dinners. Will it be pink iced buns toped with glace cherries and big round blancmanges or will it be southern-style barbecue sauces and other delectables from the little lady's own cookbook, Dixie Fixin's? Well, you'll have to wait and see. We're off to Sainsburys now and later today will be munching our way through the first delicious Parton Plate.