These are dispiriting days. Â No wonder I find myself leafing through the pages of old magazines, dreaming of a time when you could travel to London without going through metal detectors, and spend an entire week in London - hotel, meals and theater included - for less than five hundred bucks.
City not your thing? Â You could travel rural England for about the same price.
A time when I might actually be inclined to make a strawberry charlotte so complex  it required five separate recipes.
Come to think of it, this might be the perfect recipe for today, an antidote for this relentless cycle of terrible news. And since it's raspberry season, I'll use fresh instead of frozen fruit.
This issue, incidentally, is filled with fantastic recipes: Nina Simonds' take on Chinese pork. An ode to fresh coriander. And lots of interesting ways with lamb. Â Not all of them are as time-consuming as this one; I'll post more tomorrow.