I have a confession to make and I feel awful about it, but the truth must out.

I’ve been hiding from your children.

For the last couple of nights, lights off, quietly extracting a baking frozen pizza from the oven, I’ve been living stealthily and ignoring knocks at the door.

I guess, much as I’d love to, I still just Don’t Quite Get Halloween.

So, although I’ve made the decision to get rid of the car, I’m still flip-flopping wildly between the sensible, grown-up conclusion that it’s the right thing to do and, well, the child in me who loves driving the Jeep. The adult must prevail, though, so I’m continuing to push ahead on investigating the car-free lifestyle.

Perhaps the biggest problem to solve – how to get hold of provisions.

Ever the resourceful, organised individual (no, really, occasionally I can be both simultaneously), I’ve started preparing for my city move by keeping a vague eye on the rental postings to cragslist. Actually, more accurately I’ve been using the really handy housingmaps.com, since it shows you the listings all spread out on a map (albeit one from the wrong search/mapping company…)

The map is important because, after a year of getting to know SF from afar I now have a very good idea of where I would really like to live, and more importantly where I really really wouldn’t like to live.

Sorry, boastful as it sounds, but it really is that good. I don’t often exclaim out loud over a meal, but this really was amazing, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

I can’t take all the credit – it’s based on a recipe from Nigel Slater’s Appetite, a food book (not quite a recipe book – he’s deliberately non-prescriptive about the way you cook things) which everyone everywhere should own. I just tarted it up a bit , primarily by adding meat and booze, the two essential ingredients of most meals made in my kitchen.

This is not a strictly “authentic” risotto. Italian food purists would likely have a lot to say about its deviation from the norm. But hey, as long as they sit around sulking about it that leaves a second helping for everyone else…

The wisest words that anyone said to me last year regarding moving to California came not from a close friend, but from Danny O’Brien, someone I can describe as a casual acquaintance at most.

That’s not to denigrate the advice which everyone else gave me – I had tons of useful hints and ideas, particularly from folks like Candace, who lived in the Bay Area for several years. But a single point that Danny made really lodged in my brain, and has probably been the single biggest thought that I’ve returned to since I arrived here in January. It’s advice which any expat, moving anywhere, should probably take to heart.

I ran into Danny completely by chance at a “Hacker Dim Sum” lunch at Yank Sing in San Francisco, in the middle of a two-week trip to the corporate mother-ship in Sunnyvale. The company had made a tentative offer of a job in California just two days earlier, and I was still trying to wrap my head around the idea.

It’s easy to get screwed up watching the news these days. We’re seeing the first effects of the coming scarcity of oil, and yet we refuse to properly explore the alternatives. Tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and famines and unjust wars are killing millions and sometimes, just sometimes it feels like the end of the world really is nigh.

Yes, that same end of the world so desperately craved by the Christian fundamentalists, waving their “No Fags” banners and eagerly scurrying to renounce womens’ reproductive rights. Because the end of the world will bring Jeebus sailing back down from heaven to cast away the sinners and take the righteous to heaven.

All I can see is breasts and hips, those breathtaking legs and the tumbling of her hair across her bare shoulders. It’s as though she’s surrounding me with her beauty.

And I wish that it were as exciting as it sounds, for your sake, but this is just the way she dances.

The people who founded the city of San Francisco must have been insane.

“Hey, where shall we start up a new city, then?”

“How about up here on these really steep, hard to build on hills? In an earthquake zone.”

“Hey, it’s really foggy up here too. Awesome idea. “

I should point out (as well as asking you to excuse my dodgy Italian) that this isn’t actually Antonio Carluccio’s recipe for calf’s liver, but it’s something I cook from time to time which, for me, recaptures my favourite dish from long hung-over lunches with my friend Max in the Islington branch of Carluccio’s restaurant.

What’s that? Calf’s liver? Yes. Fegato is calf’s liver.

Living in California, the pervasive attitude of horror that Americans have towards offal is a source of endless amusement to me. Even more amusing is the peculiarly American euphemism “variety meats”, which leaves me with a mental image of a beefsteak in a top-hat singing vaudeville tunes.

Liver, done just right, has a fantastic melt-in-the-mouth texture and a distinctive, rich flavour which is hard to beat. It’s also full of nutrients.

Anyway, this is how I capture the London/Italian way of serving it.

This is going to seem a bit off-topic for now but bear with me and I’m sure everything will mesh into a coherent whole eventually. In a few posts’ time. If I remember to write them.

I want to talk briefly about sustainability because it’s one of the motivations behind my “leave the car behind and live in the city” plans. Excuse the apparently irrelevant opening example.

I love San Pellegrino sparkling water. I know, every time I open a bottle of the stuff, that I’m essentially being suckered by slick marketing – chubby, friendly bottles with their sophisticated light blue labels. Neverthless, I have a fondness for the stuff for a couple of reasons.