Cooking Up A Storm

As the weather makes spending time in the garden a lot less fun, I turn to my other happy place, the kitchen. 

There's something about Autumn that has me stocking my shelves and filling my freezer  - maybe it's the animal urge to stockpile against the dark and hungry winter. I'm basically a squirrel with a vast store of nuts. Or perhaps a very fat bear planning to hibernate, but a bear with access to a freezer.

Yesterday was one of those intensive cooking days. Unfortunately, I stood for longer than my knees can tolerate so today I'm stuck on the sofa writing about food rather than making it. Still, Mark's here so I've a reasonable chance of a cuppa being brought to me, and I still have some of the Lindor chocolates I bought myself as a reward for going to my various medical screening appointments three weeks ago.

I made some fishcakes first of all - I poached salmon fillets, microwaved two baked potatoes and scooped the flesh out, finely chopped some fresh dill and a spoonful of capers, mixed it all with an egg yolk and shaped it all into patties. The whisked egg white is also in the fridge, to dip the patties in before coating them in panko breadcrumbs and frying them for dinner tonight. Depending how cold I'm feeling they will either go with a nice crispy salad or I'll do french beans from the freezer (thank you, veg garden!) with some of the spiced tomato sauce Mark made yesterday for patatas bravas.

Next up was roasting things for the next three meals - on one tray, slices of aubergine for melanzane parmigiana, and on the other slices and chunks of a butternut squash. If I have to have the oven on for around 40 minutes, I want to make sure I'm using it fully. Electricity is too expensive to waste on a partially empty oven.

For the melanzane parmigiana, I do a modified version of this recipe.  Having some black beans added to the standard parmigiana means it's more filling and more nutritious. My Very Excellent Mate Alison will roll her eyes, because of course I use Bold Beans, and yes, they are ubiquitous. I don't care, I still think they are the best food product to hit the shelves in forever, and I'm delighted to see they are so successful. "I knew them before they were famous" and all that. (That's entirely down to my Very Excellent Mate Kirsty, who shared her freebies from a Bold Bean insider and made me a bean evangelist before shops were stocking them.)

The butternut chunks went into a new-to-me vegetarian lasagne recipe. There was half a jar of butter beans in the fridge, so that went into the butternut and sage layers. I took mascarpone out of the bechamel layer and instead added ricotta to the spinach layer. So it's squash and beans, spinach and ricotta, pasta, bechamel with parmesan (or pecorino, I forget which I had in the fridge). 

The slices of butternut squash will go into this lovely squash, leek and bean gratin from the Riverford Organics website. I made it a couple of weeks ago and it was a big hit with Mark, Zach and I. And yes, I know, there's more Bold Beans in it. 

Another recipe I really rate is Matar Paneer by Manali. I've used a number of her recipes over the last 6 or 7 years and they are excellent. It is honestly the nicest Matar Paneer I've had other than from a restaurant, and better than quite a few of those! I prefer my paneer fried, and I use tinned tomatoes rather than fresh because the fresh tomatoes are tasteless except in summer. I tend to make a double batch because it freezes just fine. I freeze curry in individual portions so I can have a veggie curry while Mark and/or Zach has a chicken one and we can have the same side dishes.

Speaking of side dishes, I went overboard and spent nearly 6 hours making the House Daal from the Dishoom cookbook earlier this month. That's an awful lot of simmering and stirring. A damned fine daal, though. We are lucky enough to live in a very multicultural city, so getting urad daal (black lentils) isn't the challenge it can be in some areas.

And black lentils reminds me of another (mostly) successful recipe I tried this year  - Black Chickpeas with Baharat from Ottolenghi's website.  It's very similar in structure to his Confit Tandoori Chickpeas, which has been an absolute favourite of mine for ages, but with a more Middle Eastern/North African style of flavours. Basically, bung the chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, a gargantuan amount of olive oil and the appropriate spices into a lidded casserole and stick it in the oven for 75 minutes on low. I've done it as a solo meal for me (with chicken alongside for Mark) and as part of a mezze celebration when my much missed Very Excellent Mate Emma came back to Leeds from Edinburgh briefly, alongside other middle eastern dishes, and it worked very well both ways.

 I said a partial success, because I've served to to Penny, Emma, Rajni, Gillian and Zach who all thought it was delicious - and several of them made it themselves. But Mark didn't like it because of the amount of cloves in the the seven-spice mix that makes up baharat.  Also, I grated the orange zest rather than adding strips of it, because a number of comments mentioned the strip of peel being rather bitter. And yes, it's a Bold Bean tie-in, and I'm starting to see Alison's point. (Still don't care, I love them). 

Incidentally,  the recipe works very well with regular chickpeas. The black ones have a nice nutty taste but  regular ones are also just fine. I vacillate between using jarred chickpeas (easy but expensive), cooking dried ones in the pressure cooker (very cheap and good but time consuming) and just bunging a tin in (mostly cheap but not as good.) If I can be faffed doing it, simmering a tin of chickpeas  - or any other bean - on the hob with a pinch of bicarb for 10 minutes really improves them. But some days, who cares? It's all good anyway.

Oh dear. While I've been typing Mark's fallen asleep in the chair, so I'm on my own to get a hot drink after all. Drat.

Souper Trooper

We're well into the 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' (thank you, A-Level English Lit curriculum for lodging Keats in my brain forever) and I can no longer pretend it's still summer. On the whole I am not a fan of  autumn and winter because the garden is dormant, it gets dark too soon and it's soggy much of the time.

 However, there are some positives about the cold and dark even a solar-powered soul like myself can appreciate. One is that it's time to get the beautiful Welsh woollen blanket on the bed once again. The other is that it's soup season. 

It's a very good blanket 

I love soup. I really, really love it. Not just 'quite like' but actually think about and look forward to it. It's a wonderful, comforting thing. It can be healthy or indulgent, quick or take ages, smooth to soothe a sore throat or hearty and veering towards stew. I don't care, I love all of them.

One of my favourites has been sustaining me since I was breastfeeding my second baby (who is now 24) and never had time to get a proper meal. I actually fed him with a tea towel over his head while I ate this soup because there was nothing more likely to wake him for a feed than the presence of a warm dinner for me. The soup is nourishing because of the lovely Puy lentils, and helps cut through a bunged up nose or general winter blues with the kick of sour lemon juice and heat of chilli flakes. 

Hot and Sour Soup with Lentils 

1 diced onion
1tbs olive oil
200g mushrooms
300g Puy lentils
1.5l vegetable stock
3 crushed garlic cloves
lemon juice
chilli flakes

I fry the onions in the oil until they're lightly golden, then add the mushrooms and cook for another 5-7 minutes. I add the garlic for the last minute then pour the lentils and stock in, cover and simmer for about 30-40 minutes until the lentils are fully cooked but still hold their shape. Then it's adding enough lemon juice and chilli to fit your palate - in my case about 4 tablespoons of lemon juice and a heaped teaspoon of flakes, but I like things on the punchy side.

Other days it's nice to have something creamy and comforting. Leek and Potato is obviously a winner. Cream Of Tomato soup reminds me of snowy lunchtimes in Canada when I was a kid, dunking my grilled cheese into the soup bowl at the kitchen table in our house on Ann Street.  However, most often I make soup with a single type of vegetable, roasted until sweet.

A change to these old favourites I've adopted recently is to add white beans to all my smooth soups. When they are pureed it just adds a bit of velvety smooth texture while boosting the protein, iron, minerals and fibre of the soup. Beans are ridiculously good for you and cheap, so it seems a no-brainer.

Roast 'Something' Soup

An oven tray of roughly chopped vegetable (eg butternut squash, carrots, parsnips or cauliflower)
2 tbs olive oil
vegetable stock
1 tin or jar of chickpeas or butter beans or cannellini beans
spices and salt and pepper
cream (optional)

I toss the squash slices (or carrots etc) in the oil and tip them into an oven tray which goes into a medium hot oven until the vegetable is tender. How long depends on big or small you've cut your veg, but typically it's in there for 30-50 minutes. Then I tip it in the blender with the beans and add stock slowly until it's a soup and not a puree. With squash and pumpkin soup I like to add cumin; carrot likes coriander; parsnips benefit from a dash of horseradish.  This is the time to check the seasoning and add a dash of lemon juice to brighten the flavour of the soup. Then it gets portioned up with anything not getting immediately eaten being labelled (obviously) and put in the freezer.

I took a tub of this type of soups - butternut squash with chickpeas - to have lunch with a friend the other day, and we were agreeing how brilliant this sort of food is when you just don't have the energy to stand in the kitchen. Sometimes, whether through illness, the general peri menopausal hellscape or just a case of I cannot be arsed, a container of soup in the fridge is like a hug from your past self to your current knackered self. "There, there. Don't worry, I've got you covered."

Broccoli soup is a special one - it needs almost nothing doing to it at all. Gordon Ramsay demonstrated it on telly once and it was a revelation! Literally a 5 minute soup. Just steamed broccoli put in a blender with stock and seasoning. It's a vibrant green, and is absolutely delicious with a slice of goats cheese sitting on top, gently melting. If you've ever got a slightly sad looking broccoli in the veg drawer, I can highly recommend using it up this way. 

I've written in the past about the absolute queen of soup, Pasta E Fagioli  which is especially pleasing made with home grown borlotti beans. In fact, some of last year's borlottis are in this week's sausage casserole, reminding me that the veg patch is a gift that keeps giving even when the garden is asleep.

My favourite ready made soup is the Smoked Haddock and Salmon Chowder made by Cully and Sully. It usually costs between £2.20-£3 and is a hearty meal all of its own. It's not quite up there with the marvellous Fiskesuppe we had in Norway, but it's the best soup I've had from a supermarket. 

To be honest, for me there are very few vegetable soups worth buying in the supermarket since manufacturers started adding coconut solids to soups (rather than butter) to make them vegan. It's not nearly as nice. I stick to fish soups now  if I'm buying ready made. My freezer is packed with reused Cully and Sully tubs; I buy it most weeks through winter.

The best restaurant for marvellous soup, in my opinion, is The Jolly Fisherman in Craster. They have a magnificent Crab Soup that they serve with a generous helping of homemade bread, and the House Chowder is also superb. 

I am alone in my Soup Devotion in this house. Mark enjoys the odd bowl, but he'd usually opt for a sandwich instead. (Mark and I have VERY different ideas about what qualifies as acceptable bread. I am very much Not A Fan of the damned Chorleywood process that ruined bread quality in the UK, whereas he doesn't mind) Zach never quite forgave soup for being the only thing he could eat for weeks when he first got braces, and Miss B thinks soup is boring. 

One thing we can all agree on is that Andy Warhol preserved for posterity the most truly repellent flavour of Campbell's Soups in his second Soup Cans collection of  paintings. It's currently on display at the rather wonderful Cartwright Hall in Shipley, on the edge of Bradford. What on earth were Campbell thinking?

Hot Dog Bean Soup? No ta.

 

 

Seasonal Food - Asparagus Quiche

 It's the last weekend in May and we're deep into asparagus season. We've passed the first few harvests of a handful of spears and are into the gut. The first cutting I ate while standing next to the saucepan in the kitchen; the next three or four actually made it to the plate. By mid May I had enough tall stalks to make asparagus soup, which is far and away Zach's favourite soup in the world. (I like ALL the soups)

Last weekend, following the mini heat wave, the spears had put on another burst of growth, leaving me with nearly 300g of fresh trimmed asparagus to be used that day. I decided to make a quiche. 

Sublime to ridiculous - the big one was over a metre

It must be said, I never make quiche. Ever. Mostly because it involves pastry and I hate dealing with pastry. It's awful stuff - too cold and it doesn't roll out, too warm and it stretches and sticks to everything. Dreadful. With the exception of making mince pies, I only ever use the ready made pastry, and even then unwillingly.

However, asparagus quiche does look awfully pretty, and heaven knows I've got plenty of eggs from the hens at this time of year. I decided to give it a go.

• 1 pack of ready rolled shortcrust pastry
• 4 eggs
•  140ml milk
• 80g finely grated hard cheese (cheddar, pecorino, parmesan, whatever you like)
• as many chopped asparagus spears as you can fit in your dish (about 275g in my case)
• salt and pepper 
• grating of nutmeg (optional)

I put the pastry into a lined pie tin and popped it in the freezer while the oven heated to 160 fan. Then I blind baked the pastry for 15 minutes, removed the baking beans and put it back for another 10 minutes.

I whisked the eggs, milk, seasoning and most of the cheese together in a jug. The raw spears were cut into 3cm lengths and the tips set aside. I crammed as much asparagus into the pie tin as possible and poured the egg mix over it until full. I arranged the tips in a circle in the centre of the quiche and sprinkled the remaining cheese on top before sliding it c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y into the oven.

It baked in the oven until set which took about 35 minutes, give or take. The time in the oven was just enough to lightly cook the asparagus, still leaving some bite to it, which is my preference. If you prefer asparagus soft, by all means blanch them for a minute or two before baking the quiche.

I'm not going to lie, it was superb. Really, utterly delicious in the way perfectly fresh ingredients just outclass anything you can buy in a shop. The eggs and the asparagus were food metres, not miles, and the asparagus was cut from the veg bed while the pastry was blind baking.

It was far too much for the three of us - obviously Luke wouldn't eat it and Bonnie's still at uni - so I shared some with my Very Excellent Mate Penny. She was also a fan. Asparagus one of those crops, like peas and sweetcorn, which really benefit from being home grown and eaten as soon as you pick them. The sugars start to turn to starch the moment after they're picked so freshness is crucial to the best flavour.

So I guess the real first instructions for this quiche  are:

1.  Plant your asparagus crowns in February or March. Mulch well
2. Wait three years 

 

 

We have it, I just don't know how to pronounce it.

A little over a week ago Mark bought ingredients for pesto and focaccia, intending to recreate the food we had on holiday. Then he didn't actually get around to it while I was obsessing about promised Italian food, so I ended up making them. (Never, ever proimise me cheese, Italian food or trips to New York and fail to deliver - I will obsess about them at the slightest opportunity).

Focaccia needs baking at a very high temperature. This is how I discovered our 23 year old Samsung oven no longer heated up past 140 degrees, and produced very, very bad focaccia.

The oven had been limping along for years; the door wouldn't shut entirely so it's lost heat for at least 6 years, probably more. Last month I discovered only half of the grill worked, but as we have an air fryer, that seemed manageable. 

After some very scientific research and testing (I read Good Housekeeping's recommendations, then I went to John Lewis to open and shut doors and twiddle dials) we decided on our oven. Wanting one that would last pretty much forever, we bought a Miele.

The difficulty in ordering one in person is that no one seems to know how to pronounce it. There was MEE-leh, my-EL-eh,  my-EL, MEE-lay, MEEL, MEE-luh. Each person I spoke to said it differently. In the end I was basically just pointing. "I want that one with the actual buttons, please."

It arrived promptly enough, but there were complications. We'd gone down from a double oven to a single, so Mark needed to build a shelf for it part way up the larger cavity left by the old one. This does mean we have space for an extra drawer, though, which is great.  Also, it needed wiring it. These felt a bit of a faff, so to be perfectly honest Mark procrastinated a few days before doing it just before Bonnie and her friends arrived for the Easter weekend.

There was a hitch - no power. Mark uninstalled it, connected the oven to a plug and turned it on, which showed the oven itself was fine. So it seemed to be the wiring. 

I'll be honest, mid afternoon before a 4 day weekend when you're feeding 7 people is a sub-optimal time to discover you need an electrician.  

I hit all my local WhatsApp chats is an urgent plea for a good electrician but the recommended tradesmen were either busy or on holiday. Mark finally found a bloke at 3:30 on the condition that Mark went to fetch him as his son had taken the car keys. 

 David the Sparky was very lovely. He explained the wiring was just fine but had been over-tightened, leading to a dodgy connection. He fixed that, tested it and put it back in place and was driven home clutching half a dozen fresh eggs as well as his fee, with about an hour to go before the young people arrived.

This morning I thought I should get to know the oven - technology has moved on a lot in 23 years! So first I made a dozen carrot and pecan cupcakes using the Hummingbird Bakery recipe at 2/3 proportions, then a batch of dark chocolate and orange cookies from BBC Good Food. Seeing as it is Good Friday, I've got dough for hot cross buns proving as type. You know me - go big or go home.

HAPPY EASTER - but Zach ate the A cupcake from Happy so I improvised

The new oven is amazing - it gets to temperature extremely quickly,  has a myriad of setting I don't yet understand and probably will never use, has a self cleaning function and can be operated remotely by my phone. What a marvellous modern world we live in, as Captain Jack Aubry says.

 I did the cupcakes on Conventional and the cookies on Fan Plus, and think I'll try Intensive Bake for hot cross buns, and see if I can find a difference in them at all.

 As for the name - I think I'm going with one online suggestion -  Miele rhymes with Sheila. 

 

NB - Mark more than redeemed himself for procrastinating three days with the oven by mowing the lawn today while I baked. First mow of the year! It all looks lovely.

Sort your (life?) fridge out

I absolutely love Sort Your Life Out on the BBC. Dilly, the organiser, is my hero and I go around labelling things like a fiend - my chest freezer is awe-inspiring, I promise you. However, I'm not exactly living up to the decluttering queen's standards day to day. Quite frankly, I'm very messy and fairly lazy. 

With my knee pain worsening over the past two months, the kitchen has descended into chaos lately (along with the rest of the house, god help me!) I though I'd best  have a bit of a sort out. In doing so, I found an awfully nice lunch.

Zach says that to have an ADHD diagnosis, your quality of life has to be suffering because of your struggle to concentrate or remember things. We decided that means I have Mark's ADHD.  He's vague and drifts off to something else partway through, but I'm the one whose life is affected. The number of unlocked doors, cupboard doors left ajar, half-done tasks is substantial and I have permanently bruised shins from walking into whatever drawer he's left open.

So while it's great that he thinks "I'll put that leftover lemon juice from the cocktails in a little tub in the fridge to be used up later," the system falls down because he doesn't label it and he forgets about it entirely the second he closes the door. (See also tins of baked beans, sliced tomatoes, mashed potato, gravy, ready sliced cheese for burgers). 

Mark had put a third lemon juice in the fridge while the previous two were going manky, so I figured a proper sort out of the fridge was overdue.

I chucked a bunch of mystery items (seriously, LABELS, dude!) and checked the many (so, so many) pickles and condiments (entirely my fault)for Best Before dates and emptied out the meat and vegetable drawers to check  the state of things.

I noticed the spring onions were looking a bit pathetic and the lettuce had seen perkier days so needed using up. There were three tubs of mashed potato, and in the meat and fish drawer was a tupperware with some salmon I poached a couple of days ago and didn't need all of.

Hurray, free lunch! I mixed the salmon flakes with some of the mash, finely chopped spring onions and a tablespoon of capers - I like putting capers in, it's like including tartar sauce.  I separated an egg, adding the yolk to the bowl and whisking the white. 

Giving the contents of the bowl good mix, I formed four patties. These were dipped in the beaten egg white then into a bowl of the sourdough breadcrumbs I keep in the freezer. (Every time I get to the nub end of the loaf it's usually going a bit stale, so I put it in the blender to make breadcrumbs and add it to the bag. It's very handy)

Spring onions at 1 o'clock, capers at 7

 I put the fishcakes in a hot frying pan with a bit of vegetable oil and fried them for about 3 minutes on both sides, flattening them a bit to be sure they'd warm through.

I shredded the lettuce, and using the most recent lemon juice, did a quick vinaigrette. It was really tasty - a 10 minute lunch for two using up odds and ends. It was very satisfying.

OK, not elegant but very tasty

 

I needed a nice and filling lunch because I was going to have some rather unpleasant dentistry that afternoon and who knows how long until I'm on solid food again! It was the nicest part of my Monday, other than Mark very kindly buying me flowers to cheer me up after the wisdom tooth came out.

 It was nice to feel I'd made at least one small area of my chaotic house tolerable - especially as Miss B is coming home for the Easter weekend bringing two friends to stay, and we are going to need to fit a LOT of food in that fridge. 

CBT-ing the shit out of this

Material reality is a right pain the the arse, isn't it? I might feel very much the same inside as when I had the kids 26 (and 24 and 20) years ago, but my actual physical body tells a different story.

I have always had fairly useless joints. I was forever twisting an ankle and falling off boots with only a very modest heel even in my teens.  I could still put my foot behind my head in my mid 30s but I couldn't walk in anything higher than about 2 inches without risking breaking my neck (yay, hypermobility). I'm a klutz, but I'm ok about it.

My hips and knees went all to hell during my pregnancies, each worse than the last.  That resulted in being on crutches and a lot of pain for most of Bonnie's pregnancy, and things never quite went back to place. I also have osteoarthritis and have struggled with (often acute) knee pain since my 30s. 

A lot of that was my own damned fault - I hated exercise, I love food and drink, and the only healthy lifestyle choice I've ever made is never smoking. I treated my body more as an amusement arcade than a temple, and I took pretty lousy care of myself for a variety of uninteresting reasons. I also worked standing up for 10 or more hours a day for the 8 years I had the baking business in my 30s and 40s, and the knees got worse and worse.

Over the past 10 years I've been trying to tackle this in a number of ways. I found pool-based exercise classes for people with similar problems and I approached them with zeal. I was going to three a week at one point and my basic mobility was really improving. I can stand up without leaning on the arms of chairs and my balance is far better. I lost a significant amount of weight which has helped with joint inflammation - my knees aren't burning hot by mid afternoon anymore. 
This is very good.

But. There's always a But.

More and more often I was missing Aqua classes because of pain and injury. Falling awkwardly when a rug slipped on a polished floor put me completely out of action for a couple of months and noticeably affected me for over a year. A too-vigorous class leaves me sofa-bound for two days. My knees give way numerous times a day. I try not make a fuss but the pain is sharp and debilitating. Days here are punctuated by yips and short shrieks like I have a particularly piecing form of Tourettes.

Anyway, here I am at 56 years old. I have done what I can to fix the pain from my knees - and, increasingly, hips - but each year I'm getting worse and worse. I can no longer get to the end of the road without a crutch and am desperate for a sit down at least 4 times if I try walk to the coffee shop 200m away.

My life has become small. I can't stand it.

Being a total hypocrite who pushed her Dad into getting a mobility scooter and an elevator in his house so he can go upstairs, I have flatly refused to get a walking stick. I have a crutch, because a crutch is something people use when they are recovering from an injury. Like a broken ankle or or ACL tear, say. A crutch feels like it might well be temporary. A walking stick? That's permanent. We don't need that.

Having walked across the very compact city centre of Leeds twice in the last few months and been couch bound for several days after, I really can't pretend this is going to go away. I can't pop to the shops, or post a letter, or pick up a prescription, or just live my life like a normal person. 

This is stupid. I love being out and about, I love being around people. I can't self-identify as a physically mobile person, I can't wish myself better and I can't alter the material reality that my joints are shot. And it's only going to get worse as I age. Exercise is great for maintaining the best mobility I can have, but it can't fix the degradation of the joints that's already there, nor make me younger and less broken.

What I can do, and what CBT has always been wonderful at helping me do, is reassess.

This is where I am now. I can't change the past, I can't change the state I am in. I can, however, accept this less than ideal reality and decide to problem-solve my way out of it. This will not be pleasant, but it will be effective. 

Okay. So I can't walk much at all. In old school terms, crippled. (We laugh when Dad calls his Blue Badge his Cripple Sticker... it's funny because it's true.) I can ride my beloved Vespa but I struggle to put it on its stand when I get where I'm going. I am a permanently disabled person who won't be striding up  the big hill at Fairburn Ings to watch the starling murmurations nor walk along the Giant's Causeway. 

NB - Those example do rather break my heart as I love murmurations and it's been my longtime ambition to see the basalt columns of the Causeway. And Petra. A woman can dream.

But I can do something about some of that. I can accept where I'm at. And that really, really hurts.

It's hard to give up the belief I can get better, that there's a life without joint pain and lousy mobility. One day (actually, in about 5 years or so I expect) I may qualify for NHS knee surgery and that might change things, but right here and now, it doesn't. And it's hard to accept limitations are real, and not wish them away.

So what would allow me to do what I want to do? There's an easy answer to that - a scooter or electric wheelchair. It's not the same as being about to self-propel, but it's a damned sight better than self-excluding from everything.  

I don't claim disability benefits or anything like that, so I don't have hoops to jump through to access mobility schemes. This is actually an advantage. I can work out what best suits my ambitions for my life and buy it. No having to prove to strangers just how broken I am, like when I got the Blue Badge. Gods, that's a depressing procedure. I'm glad I won't have to do that.

I also have been in vociferous denial that this is a permanent state of affairs. Every year I start mapping out our trip to the Giant's Causeway and every year I have to push it back because I've had a setback and I can't walk enough yet. 

YET.

For heaven's sake, Jay! It won't get better, so have a cry then book a wheelchair-accessible trip and go see the wonders of geology from relatively close by. It's not clambering on the rocks, but it's still pretty damned cool. As the Rolling Stones told us, we can't always get what we want. Close will do.

I have a choice. I can remain in denial that this is my life and I can miss out of loads of experiences and a better quality of life. Or I can jettison a stubborn mindset that a) being disabled is a 'lesser' thing (it isn't, it's just more difficult) and b) that ignoring it will make it all go away at some point.

I was pretty ruthless when pushing Dad to install that elevator between the dining room and his bedroom. I even used the  - frankly unethical, although true - argument that Mum would have insisted on his getting one, so if he wanted to respect what she would have wanted, he'd better stop messing around being stranded downstairs all damned day and get the lift installed.

I was right, obviously, and it vastly improved his life and his ability live in his own home. Now I need to apply the same standard to myself.  

I have been to try a few mobility scooters and chairs. And today I've referred myself to a mobility organisation for an assessment to discuss which  chair or scooter would be most appropriate for what I want to be able to do. 

It's a small start, but I hope it's a productive one.

 

 

My Year In Books

Books. Aren't they just so damned addictive? Every year I promise myself I'll get rid of some of my books to free up a bit of space. Every year I buy more than I give away. I'd be absolutely sorted if I didn't hate e-reading so much. 

2025 has been a great year of reading for me. I got some good books for Christmas last year and spent my birthday money on even more, so I've read a good 20 to 30 new-to-me titles.

The absolute stand out pleasure has been the Ithaca trilogy by Clare North. I love Clare's science fiction novels so I was confident her writing would be good, but even so this series blew me away. It's set on the island of Ithaca, home of Odysseus, and chronicles the life of his wife Queen Penelope who has to use every ounce of her wit and guile to rule over a place missing a generation of men, subjected to piracy and political machinations of neighbouring kingdoms, and that will not accept a woman in charge.

Each one (Ithaca, The House of Odysseus and The Last Song Of Penelope) is narrated from the perspective of one of the three Goddesses involved in the fight for the golden apple that started all the trouble. Hera, Aphrodite and Athena have strong and distinct voices, and very different biases. It was a marvellous conceit through which to tell the story and I'd buy Clare North a box of chocolates for it if I could. The women of the island were well drawn characters that I desperately cared about, and I had to ration myself to only reading one then having something else on the go to eke out the story as long as I could.

 Sticking to Ancient Greece, I recommend both Natalie Hayne's Stone Blind and No Friend To This House. I enjoy Haynes on the radio as well as through her novels. She's smart, funny and tells a good story.

Another big win was The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. My lovely friend and neighbour Penny bought it for me when I got home from our week in Rapallo because von Arnim had been living there when she wrote it, and the book is set on that headland. It was a gorgeous literary extension of the holiday, with the sea and sky so blue and the buildings glowing in the sun. Penny is a skilled hand at choosing just the right book for a person or an occasion; she puts a great deal of thought into her gifts. I'm lucky to have her as a friend.

Setting for The Enchanted April
 

She also gave me Remarkably Bright Creatures, knowing how I feel about octopuses. (I think they are at least as bright as we are, and possibly more. They are certainly the closest to an alien mind we have ever encountered.) The narrator is an octopus in an aquarium, and it was a good fun.

However, it did tip into the trend for Bloody Ridiculous Narrators To Choose. In the past two years I've had an octopus, a tree, a book, a pigeon, some water, a dog, and probably a couple others I can't remember. I don't mean when an animal narrates a story about animals, or when it's a non-human person like a cyborg or AI or super intelligent spiders (hurray for Adrian Tchaikovsky!) or ghosts of people who have died in the story. I mean stories about people 'whimsically' told by an unexpected being. I'm all for a bit of whimsy here and there, but not whole torrents of it. It's a seasoning, not a main course.

For holiday reading I thoroughly enjoyed two by Tracy Chevalier: Remarkable Creatures about my heroine Mary Anning and The Glassmakers about the Venetian island of Murano through the centuries. Daisy Jones and the Six as an audio book was an ideal choice to keep me entertained through airports and flights and trains - the voice cast is excellent. There was also Small Bomb at Dimperley from Lissa Evans, which I enjoyed but it was slightly spoilt by my sky-high expectations given how much I loved the more ascerbic Old Baggage and Crooked Heart. This was an enjoyable romcom and I wish I'd read it first, not last. 

I did have two clunkers while in Italy. The first as Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson, whom I'd only previously read as a children's author. I forced myself to finish it because I was running low on holiday books and still had 3 days to go, but thought it was leaden and dull. 

Casting about in desperation, I found Sally Rooney's Intermezzo on the swap shelf in the hotel. I've never read any of hers and figured it was worth a punt. Nope. It's boring, has too much sex and not enough personality. One of the main character reminded me of the really irritating drippy John Irving protagonists he went through a phase of - the type of bloke you'd like to give a slap to and tell them to buck their ideas up. I can't be arsed with navel-gazing ineffectual men.

Another I read that seemed to be everywhere was James by Percival Everitt.  It's Huckleberry Finn as told by escaped slave Jim, but it's essentially one 'joke' (that black people are well spoken but put on a dumb patios in the presence of white folk) stretched far past breaking point. It would have worked for me as a short story but across 303 pages it wore mighty thin.

I've been reading quite a lot of non-fiction (for me) lately but as usual I rarely finish them. I start all enthusiastically, galumph through the early chapters but then fade out like a a toddler with a Sesame Street attention span. However, I do like to pick them up from second had shops to dip into when the subject looks interesting. The low cost helps to offset the didn't-finish-it guilt.

The memoir Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner was interesting as a snapshot into a culture I don't know much about - tourism from the armchair is much cheaper than the real kind! I didn't get terribly far with Normal Woman by Philippa Gregory because it covered quite a lot of the same ground as Femina by Janina Ramirez, which I read a couple of years back. 

In contrast, I positively devoured Unfortunately She Was A Nymphomaniac by Joan Smith, which defends the reputation of the Julio-Claudian women of Ancient Rome. Having reread Robert Graves last year, I am embarrassed that I took his wild and misogynistic characterisations in I, Claudius and sequel as true. Poor Livia, the slandered villain of the piece, and poor starved Julia. The Caesars were brutal to the women they disliked or discarded.

I bought Unfortunately when I went to the Women's Right's Network's book festival in November. At the same time I bought yet more histories of women and essays about women's rights, but those are the kind I can dip into for one essay at a time.  Much as I once needed to read Satanic Verses to see what all the protests were about, I'm enjoying The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht, which caused the National Library of Scotland to nearly self-combust this autumn. It was introduced at the festival by its co-editor Susan Dalgety, who has so many tales to tell and dirt to dish I wish I could be on a night out with her. She also has a downright filthy laugh. Her book certainly sparked a long and interesting conversation with Luke.

I've read a couple of books about buying less (borrowed from the library, naturally) and about being more connected to the natural world, but I kind of do that stuff anyway. The books about birds by Tim Birkhead  - The Most Perfect Thing and What It's Like To Be A Bird - have been very interesting while my pitiful attention span holds, but ultimately I read because I want to be told a story.

Between this year and last I read the first three Brandon Sanderson Mistborn novels. I love a bit of fantasy and interesting world-building, so Luke thought this would be something I could get my teeth into. He was right, as he so often is, and I will happily read more Sanderson in future. After all, poor old Robin Hobb can't be responsible for every mighty fantasy tome, can she? I did read the three Wild Ships novels this year, rounding out her already remarkable world. She takes up about 6 feet of bookshelves alone.

 R.F Kuang's been very busy over the last few years. After a brief foray into her satirical fiction  Yellowface, I returned to her fantasy with Babel, which was fascinating to anyone with a love of just the right word and correct nuance for a situation.  It has racism, colonialism, isolation, magic and conspiracies while romping through an alternate Oxford weirder even than Lyra's. Her latest, Katabasis, is on my wish list for next year.

For science fiction, I've only read a few this year and only one new one. The Ministry Of Time (which barely counts) kind of fluffed its execution while landing the ending pretty well.  I revisited my old pal Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. 

Uncharacteristically, I only read 6 Georgette Heyers instead of my usual 15-20. I chose Terry Pratchett for most of my comforting re-reads instead - first all the Guards novels, then dipping my toe in a variety of them as they appealed to me including Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany Aching novels.. I think I needed the humour. And it does me good to have a gap from Heyer now and again because I know my favourites almost by heart.

 Zach loaned me Batman: Year One by Frank Miller in a sincere attempt to overcome my long-held impression that Batman is basically an asshole. I like Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Superman, the X-men (Bryan Singer movie versions, at least) and Ms Marvel, but the Caped Crusader always seemed more of a sociopath than a hero.  I was impressed! Year One was a very engaging story.  That was a super introduction for me, although Jim Gordon almost broke my heart. He's queued up another couple for me to carry on with. I like the lads' determination to share their cultural capital with me the way I share mine with them.

Queen B doesn't recommend books to me often but we share a few authors. We both enjoy Emily Henry's romance novels.  I wasn't as taken by Funny Story, which I read in the summer, so I re-read Book Lovers and Holiday Read to get me back in the mood. 

Oh! I forgot one of the big hits of the year - The Voyage Home by the sublime Pat Barker.  It was the final in the trilogy started by The Silence Of The Girls (my book of the year at the time). Barker's prose is so gorgeous I always feel I'm in the room with the characters, hearing the insects chirp and smelling the blood and the dirt. I love a book that sweeps me in so utterly that I forget my surroundings. 

I expect in January I'll tell myself I need to make more space and give away another 30 or 40 books again, before instantly filling the space with a new batch of exciting stuff to read.

It's still a shame I hated my Kindle so much. It felt the ideal solution to my slightly out of control book habit. My mum-in-law Marion very kindly bought me one for Christmas some years ago. But somehow it's just not the same without a cover and pages. At least the kids use it. 

I'm sticking to paperbacks. 

Anyone got a runcible spoon?

As anyone with an allotment or fruit trees in the U.K. will know, this has been a Mast Year for trees producing nuts and fruit - meaning an absolute glut of produce. The weather conditions conspired to make everything go into overdrive and as a result boughs are bent under the weight of apples, plums, pears, everything. I had to take off half the unripe plums to stop the victoria plum's branches snapping under their weight. People literally cannot give away their apples for free because everyone has far more than they can use.

There is one exception in our garden - my beautiful little quince tree in a pot. We had a wind storm just after the blossom opened and they blew off without a chance to be pollinated, so it's another year without fruit for me. But not, it seems, for others.

Somewhat overripe but scented quinces

I was lucky enough to get a bag of quince from a guy with heavily cropping tree in our old neighbourhood. They are like large yellow pears with an amazing smell and a dense texture. I kept sticking my head in the bag to sniff them because it was just so delightful. It's a hard scent to describe, but it's fruity and perfumed at the same time, and nothing else is quite like it.

 I had made quince jam before but I wasn't happy with the slightly gritty texture. You know that underripe pear sensation, where it's a bit granular? It's like that writ large. I had clearly not done something right, but all the blogs and articles I read about quince said either that you needed to push it through a mouli, that it just was slightly grainy, or that if it's grainy you're doing it wrong but without any further information of how to do it right. So I decided to make quince jelly instead - like the membrillo you can buy in Spain to have with manchego and other hard cheeses, but not quite as tart. Let's be honest, any excuse to eat cheese is a win.

 I roughly chopped the fruit - which took some doing, those things are rock hard! Between the pesto making and the quince my arms are going to be bulging with muscles at this rate. (One can dream). I put it in a large pan with some water and simmered it until mushy - it took about 2 hours. One of the nice things about making a jelly rather than a jam is you don't have to peel and core anything, just whack it into chunks and let it cook down slowly, so it's a nice easy way to make a preserve.

Rather enthusiastically bubbling quince

Once it had cooled, I set up my straining bag and its holder. Or rather, I didn't. I couldn't find the damned straining bag anywhere. I looked in all the sensible places and several not so sensible places, to no avail. Mark suggested the mighty Cliff's Hardware, which is a tiny shop that sells everything you can possibly think of. Although they assured me they usually had jelly bags they were out of stock at the minute.

As an aside, I hope everyone has a Cliff's in their life.  The sort of place where you can hold up the broken bit of dishwasher or esoteric connecting pipe and they'll reach behind their counter and say "like one of these?" and you will be able to fix whatever it is, even if you do have to go back twice more for further advice. It's a bit like a halfway house between Mr Hooper's store and Luis's fix it shop on Sesame Street - they don't do the repair but they sell you the stuff so you can, and explain what you need to do if you're unsure. The staff are unbelievably patient, friendly and knowledgeable. Timber, plumbing, tea cosies, bird seed, bedding plants, hay for your guinea pigs - Cliff's Hardware has you covered.

With this rare lapse by Cliff's, I still had not straining bag. Mark offered a trip to Harrogate to buy one from Lakeland, which would have included a bonus trip to Betty's for a fondant fancy (my personal favourite) but as he was in the midst of painting the kitchen I declined. Better to get that done than my domestic experimenting. I had found a metre of muslin in my search, though, so I ran up a spectacularly bad but still functional drawstring bag on the sewing machine. I really should remember the bit about measuring twice before I cut once. Oops.

We're in the middle of decorating,
 of course it's a mess

With the mush of 2kgs of quince shoved into the bag suspended above a large bowl, I left it to drip through the fabric overnight. It didn't do much, so I wrapped a couple of tins of tomatoes in clingfilm and used them as weights to get more liquid through.

The result as a scant pint of juice, give or take. I added 400g of sugar to the liquid and simmered it to reduce until it reached 104.5 degrees Celsius. That left me with a single jam jar of crystal clear pink jelly - not much to show for 2 kg, 2 hours cooking, 18 hours draining and then half an hour simmering with sugar, is it?

But throughout that time the house smelled amazing. And to be honest I wasn't making quince jelly because we needed a decent supply of it, I was doing it because it seemed like fun. 

I should have stopped a little before 104.5 as the quince jelly is very firm. Then again, the Owl and the Pussycat dined on slices of quince, so it's probably meant to be like that. At least, that's what I'm now claiming.

So there we have it - one glowing jar of scented beauty, to be put aside until the Christmas cheeseboard brings cheeses worth such an effort.

The owl and the pussycat went to sea 
In a beautiful pea-geen boat...
...They dined on mince, and slices of quince, 
Which they ate with a runcible spoon 

 

 

 

Bringing The Holiday Home With Me

 

 Obviously one of the many reasons to holiday in Italy is the food. What's not to love? Seafood, pasta, pizza, risotto... the whole country is awash in marvellous things to eat. It would be daft not to make the most of it.

Inspired by my very excellent mate Kirsty's habit of going to a cooking lesson when she's on holiday, I booked Mark and I a morning of making the traditional Ligurian pesto and focaccia in a restaurant in the stunning town of Sestri Levante, a short ride on the local train from our hotel in Rapallo. 

Lovely restaurant in Sestri Levante

Yes, I've made pesto before, but it was just more fun doing it with the local ingredients - a scant tablespoon of pine nuts, mounds of fresh basil from Pra', Ligurian olive oil from cold pressed Taggiasca olives, and their preferred a mix of parmesan and Sardinian pecorino. Of all the things we ate in Italy, the warm focaccia lavishly coated in freshly made pesto was pretty much the best thing, and believe me there was some fierce competition! 

All the essential supplies

The charming  Davide insisted that a glass of wine was a very necessary part of making pesto. I remember my Dad saying something similar in Canada in the 1970s - if he didn't have a cold beer in one hand, the barbeque just wasn't going to cook properly. I wasn't entirely convinced that was true for pesto being made at 10:30 in the morning, to be honest. Breakfast Wine is not something I want. However, Davide said wine was what powered the pestle and mortar - without a sip of wine to keep you going as you pound away, you won't have the oomph to make a smooth and delicious pesto.

Like I say, he was a very charming fella. 

See? Charming!

 I was very surprised how little salt and pine nuts went into the recipe. It was maybe half a teaspoon of coarse salt with half a plump garlic clove and the pine nuts that we pounded into a cream to start with. Then it was picking the leaves off mounds and mounds of basil, thumping the bejeesus out of it in a big heavy mortar with a marble pestle, and then thumping some more. The grated cheese was added a tablespoon a time with yet more pummelling in between. If I did this often I'd have muscles Rosie the Riveter would be proud of. Three or four tablespoons of cheese later and we were finished.

Davide said the oil must never be added to the mortar because the marble (or stone) is porous and will absorb it. We scooped all the paste onto our pestles like a glowing green basil gelato cone and put it in jars to be topped by olive oil. Apparently, the pesto is mixed with the appropriate amount of oil when it's going to be served. Otherwise, as long as it was covered with a layer of oil to prevent oxygenation, it was fine as a fairly stiff paste.

Having a brilliant time 

 
When we got home I was keen to try out making pesto - nearly as keen as Zach was to eat it! I have a very small Mason and Cash pestle and mortar I use for crushing spices,so I had a go with that.

Nightmare.

The bowl was far too small and the pestle far too light to crush the leaves thoroughly. It took muscle power to break it down, and muscles aren't what I'm known for. I'm more of a limp noodle than a powerhouse and it was absolutely exhausting.  I am never doing that again.

Luckily there was a very big stone pestle and mortar in the sale due to one of Amazon's spurious reasons for an event (I can't even remember what that one was called, but it wasn't Black Friday) so I bought myself that enormous thing* and had another go.

Seriously enormous, weighs a ton

 

However, all that weight means the heavy pestle does a superb job of bashing the poor basil into submission.  It took less than a third of the time of the small one and was a great deal more fun. It was also rather intimidatingly loud, for which I probably owe my neighbours apologies. And poor Luke who was nearby and nearly jumped out of his skin.

Having tried pesto with the traditionally shaped Trofie pasta (very narrow twists) and with breadsticks and focaccia, I fancied a go at trying to replicate a delicious lunch I'd had in Santa Marguerita. It was big billowing sheets of fresh pasta with loads of pesto on top. It looked messy and awful, but it was so light and delicious. 

Least appetising, most delicious

 

I've not made pasta with 00 flour before, but as I was trying to do it all with the proper Italian ingredients I bought flour to have a go. Bloody hell, that stuff is so much harder to work with than plain flour! It was so very stiff I wondered if I'd got the proportions wrong. I was using Angela Hartnet's 400g to 4 large eggs and a tablespoon of olive oil. I rolled half of it out to thing, long lasagne sheets ribbons and cooked them for around 3 minutes.

I'd been a bit overly free passing homemade pesto around my friends and neighbours to have the quantity  the restaurant served on the pasta, but it was still absolutely delicious. The pasta was light and silky, the pesto was strongly herby with just a gentle kick of garlic and it all felt like a bowl of happiness. Z and I agreed we'd definitely have it again, although with regular flour next time unless I take up an interest in weight lifting in the meantime.

There was the other half batch of pasta dough left over, so a couple of days later Zach and I had homemade tagliatelle with a puttanesca sauce, one of our favourites.  It normally takes less time to make the sauce than the pasta takes to cook, but that isn't true when cooking fresh pasta -  fresh pasta is done in two to three minutes. It's still a ridiculously quick sauce and punches far above its weight in the effort vs flavour ratio. We enjoyed it very much. (Mark, the Philistine, chose fried chicken tenders and chips instead. There's no accounting for taste)

I love puttanesca

*If I am ever found dead in my kitchen, there's a fair chance it will be because I dropped this damned thing on myself when trying to put it away. It weighs a ton and could probably fell an elephant. 

Flying The Flag On Holiday

Mark and I have just returned from a wonderful week in Rapallo, a coastal town not far from Genoa in Liguria. It's a lovely old town full of beautifully painted buildings in the tromp d'oeil style so typical of that area. It's also Not The Pretty One, supposedly. At least, not in comparison to its neighbours Santa Marguerita Ligure and Portofino - which as Mark pointed out, tells you how thoroughly spoilt the Italians are for beauty, if they can regard a gem like Rapalla as the "meh" town of the region.

Rapallo in the early evening

 
 I have lots to say about the food and the beauty and the food and the people and also in particular, the food, but it's something else that I want to write about today. 

As anyone living in the UK will know from the news, there are the flags of St George popping up all over the place in England. Not just flags attached to lampposts but naff spray-painted red crosses onto mini roundabouts in the road, and any other available white surface. It's either declaration of pride and love of England or a dog whistle to show non-white or non-English people that they aren't welcome, depending on your news source.

So I was surprised to see the flag of St George flying absolutely all over the place in the Genoese region. And it's for an absolutely brilliant reason - It's not our flag anyway.

We have to go back to the middle ages. There's England, trading in the Mediterranean far from home. We had no reputation to speak of. No one was intimidated by us; our traders, merchants, pilgrims and vessels are all easy targets for any pirates, bandits or opportunists who see easy pickings. England was getting her butt kicked in the Mediterranean arena, and it was expensive. What she needed was an ally - help from someone too fearsome to be messed with who'd offer England protection.

This is where Genoa, The Republic Of The Magnificents, came in. Genoa was extremely powerful, wealthy and well-armed. It had colonies across the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea. The city was a major power from 1099 through to the 1700s, first through might and then through banking. It was Venice's main rival as a trading power and had a formidable reputation.

For a 'substantial' annual fee, Genoa allowed England to fly the Genoese flag of St George, knowing that anyone seeing that flag will not want to incur the wrath of the republic known as La Dominante and La Superba. (Italian republics really went in for nicknames. Just look at The Eternal City and La Serenissima)

For literally hundreds of years England paid Genoa for the right to fly their flag. Hundreds of years .From Richard the Lionheart to the mid 18th century. We only stopped paying when Austria invaded Genoa. The mayor of Genoa in 2018 jokingly requested 247 years of back rent for the flag the English now think of as theirs.

I love this. When Tommy 'Not a racist, honest, guvnor' Robinson had his march in London the other week and there were countless images of people wearing the St George's cross flag as a cape, I like knowing that it's the flag of somewhere else. That we had to pay protection money to use the flag because our own name didn't count for much. When they talk about pride in their country while flying a cross of St George, I don't think 'borrowed muscle' is the pride they mean. 

That brought me to another public item on display - signs. I like signs in new places. I did see something else displayed in Liguria that delighted me - a handwritten sign, emphatically underlined and over punctuated, outside a street-side pizzeria in the tourist town of Santa Marguerita.

It was everything in one pithy sentence - the cultural difference between the Brits and the Italians, how common it was that this misunderstanding occurred, and just how frustrated both British tourists and Italian waiting staff found the behaviour of the other side. 

Line Has No Value

Line Has No Value is almost a declaration of war to a country with a penchant for queueing. There is nothing a Brit won't turn into a queue given the opportunity. When a bunch of people are waiting for something, we don't just rush in like some pack of savages, we form an orderly queue and shoot daggers from our eye while harumphing should someone attempt to push in. (This doesn't apply when getting on the Tube in London for some reason.)
 

The number of patiently queuing potential diners getting huffy that they aren't being seated, and the sheer impossibility of actually speaking to someone to request un tavolo when you could indicate your wish without having to exchange a word...  You know it has to be substantial if a sign written in Sharpie with two underlining and four exclamation points needs cellotaping over your cafe name.

I bloody love the Italians. And not just for their food. But mostly.

 

When In Rome

When I was a teenager I believed I'd been born in the wrong place.

I believed in souls and bodies in the Cartesian dualism mode back then; that souls were slotted into bodies as if they were assigned dorm rooms. What can I say? I was a teenager in the 80s; I believed a lot of stupid stuff. Particularly things could be used in a romantic narrative of soul mates, miracles and true love. If a story was beautiful enough surely it must be true. 

I was born in Chester to a family living in North Wales and I grew up living in a small town in Southern Ontario. This was clearly an error on the part of the universe. I didn't like small towns. I was supposed to be going to theatres and ballets and live in a major city because everything good about the world could be found in a city. I was supposed to be French, ideally. I was meant to be eating amazing food and within reach of great art and inspiring architecture. 

When I moved to the U.K. in my late teens I made getting to Paris my main focus, and I went as often as I could: 7 times in 6 years.  Finally, I was visiting a place that spoke to my soul. I loved Paris, but I wasn't sure it loved me. I was too noisy and uncool.

And then, 9 years from arriving in the U.K, I had a long weekend in Florence. Oh. My. God.

My soul wasn't French, it was Italian. Loud, messy, demonstrative, passionate, food-obessessed - not to mention holding a full motorbike licence for my Vespa. Obviously I was Italian! 

I don't believe in souls and duality anymore. I'm resigned to being a Canadian/Yorkshire woman in her mid 50s. I've been through enough with this body to know it is me and I am it, we aren't separate. But I still think Italy is pretty much the most wonderful place I can think of, other than my own garden. Florence, Rome, Venice, I adore them all.

There was marvellous story on the BBC News website this week that reminded me why I love Italy so damned much and why it's such a good fit for me. It gets worked up over the sort of tiny details that I also get aerated about.

There was a recipe on the BBC Good Food website for Cacio e Pepe, that most Roman of pasta dishes. This recipe caused a Roman restaurant committee to write a letter of protest to the British ambassador. The recipe described Cacio e Pepe as "a speedy lunch", which was felt to diminish this deceptively simple classic, but most egregious of all it included butter and parmesan.

Cacio e Pepe is spaghetti, pepper and pecorino cheese. Here's what the Italians said:  

• "We are always told we are not as good as the BBC*... and then they go and do this. Such a grave mistake." 
• "What Good Food published with butter and parmesan is called Pasta Alfredo. It's another kind of pasta." 
• "You have to yield to Caesar that which is Caesar's." 
• "Our tradition is based on food. So if you touch the only thing that we have..."

A letter to the British Ambassador. I am not kidding. God, I bloody love the Italians.

In remembrance of trips to Rome over the years and to correct our country's offence against Roman culinary history, last night I made Zach and I Cacio e Pepe the Roman way. That is to say, correctly. (Or at least I sincerely hope so)

Cacio e Pepe for 2

Put a kettle on to boil water for the pasta and then add it to a pan with a hefty dash of salt. Only fill the pan about halfway. The trick is to not use too much liquid as you want to water to get a good amount of starch in it. 

Add spaghetti or linguine or similar to the pan, stir to prevent it sticking and cook it for 3 minutes less than the instructions on the packet. It will finish cooking as the sauce builds.

Finely grate about half a wedge of pecorino romano, so probably 60g to 80g for two people.  It does need to be finely grated; regular grating is prone to get clumpy when we hit the emulsifying part. Put it in a bowl with plenty of room for stirring.

Grind a lot of black pepper - about 1.5 - 2 teaspoons full. Toasted that in a dry frying pan over a low heat until it releases its fragrance but take care not to burn it.

While the pasta cooks, add several tablespoons of the pasta water into the pepper and swirl it around a bit, then another few tablespoons. Once the pasta hits that 3 Minutes To Go point, do not drain it. Use tongs to lift the al dente pasta into the frying pan and toss it about in the pan, coating it with the pepper and starchy water, which will emulsify into a creamy start of a sauce. 

You need to guess a little about the amount of water, but go for less rather than more. It's easy to add a couple of tablespoons to a thick sauce before serving but not to thicken a thin one.

Add several tablespoons of the remaining pasta water to the mound of finely grated pecorino and stir it until it makes a thick smooth paste. Take the pasta frying pan off the heat and let it rest a moment to lose a little heat. If you add the pecorino paste while at simmering temperature the sauce more likely to split or get claggy, so do take that half a minute or so.

Using the tongs to toss the pasta and pecorino paste together in the pan until glossy and coated in the silky sauce. Serve with a little extra ground black pepper on top.

It really is a very easy and straightforward pasta dish, but tastes so much more than the sum of its parts. And of course anything that makes me think of Rome is a good thing. 

Ciao, amici miei!

* although the BBC got the blame because of the domain name BBCGoodFood, it actually sold off the Good Food site a couple of years back so it's not actually the Beeb's fault.

Celebrating Mum's birthday in Rome in 2008

Beets me

 One of my favourite experiments in the veg patch is growing something we think we don't like. 

My reasoning goes that if you can taste something picked at its best, prepared freshly and still dislike it, you've given that food every chance and you never have to try that thing again... but you might be surprised.

I used to think I didn't much like sprouts until I grew them and harvested them myself. Peas got a lot more interesting to small children who could eat them fresh out of the pod. Somehow red currants off the bush are vastly nicer than those in a supermarket. In fairness kohlrabi remained boring and salsify just wouldn't grow so there's not always a success, but it's a game worth playing. 

In my opinion, the worst family of vegetables is that loathesome Clean Dirt masquerading as food, beets and chard. There's no faster way to destroy a salad than to add some baby chard leaves, or that duplicitous, misnomered leaf Perpetual Spinach. Aside - It's not spinach, it's a chard. The name is to make it sound good when it's actually dreadful. Just accept that spinach bolts and sow it successionally.

Worst of all is the Root Vegetable of Doom, beetroot. 

I've had it grated raw in salads, pickled, roasted with other veg, added to hummus, as a so called crisp, ruining added to a smoothie  and god knows what they do to the weird vacuum sealed stuff in the supermarket, but I've had that too. All tasting like a mouthful of earth. At least the pickled one was dirt with added vinegar. 

I'm not alone in this. When my Dad did a bit of vegetable growing in a corner of their herbaceous garden, he was delighted by the success of his beetroot crop. My Mum actually had nightmares about him force-feeding it to her. 

A few years ago I blew a moderate fortune on booking 6 months ahead to take Mark to Tommy Banks's restaurant The Black Swan at Oldstead*. Don't get me wrong, it was money well spent, it was the meal of a lifetime! What I didn't realise was that one of the signature dishes is a slab of crapaudine beetroot cooked for 5 hours in beef fat or olive oil. Yikes!

It was absolutely delicious.

With that in mind, this year I decided to give beets a chance**.

If Tommy Banks goes to the hassle of growing 14th century French heritage beets, and I really want to give beetroot the best go at being acceptable, I thought I should probably do the same. Crapaudine means toad, a reference to the rough skin on these unusual beets. Only specialist and heritage growers sell the seeds, but there are lots of chef-type recipes specifying them in recipes so I figured they must be worth the hassle.

Looking a bit moth eaten by October

Germination went quite well. I sowed the seeds direct in May, with a second, less successful sowing in late June. The leaves looked like pretty much standard beets but the root itself is more like a fat parsnip shape than a globe. I wasn't expecting that. Unfortunately, the same problem as I've had with both carrots and parsnips happened with the beets - they hit an obstacle in the soil and split. I had a nice thick cylinder for the top few inches of root, them they split into useless leggy strands.

Slightly deformed beetroot

Still, I had some healthy looking plants, so was free to experiment.

First I tried the baby leaves, which I'd been told were good in salads. Nope, they taste exactly like chard and are horrible. The hens were extremely grateful to my picky tastebuds as they got loads of nice leafy treats. Personally, I'd rather go hungry.

Next, I tried one of the tiny beetroots raw after I'd thinned the row a bit. Dad said they are particularly nice when young. Nope, still like willingly eating dirt. 

When it came to cooking them, I decided on a split approach. I would drizzle some in oil and salt and roast in a tinfoil parcel, and the other I would try approximate the Tommy Banks approach by cooking it on a very low heat in olive oil on the hob for a few hours.

The latter didn't work at all. Even on the lowest setting on the smallest gas ring, the oil cooked too vigorously. I ended up with a weird halfway house of boiling olive oil then turning the heat off, back and forth for about 2 hours before I abandoned it. I think I should have removed the beetroot from the oil at that point but I let it cool down first.

The second worked really well! I couldn't justify having the oven on for a couple of hours for just beetroot, so I also baked a gluten free lime yogurt cake for my Very Excellent Mate SJ, then one of my favourite easy meals, confit tandoori chickpeas from Ottolenghi. 

To serve it, I meant to have nice seeded flatbreads with Abergavenny goats cheese and walnuts. As it turned out, the shop didn't have any flatbreads and the walnuts in the cupboard were stale, so we went with just the beetroot and cheese.

The attempted confit beetroot was a bit oily, but other than that they all tasted pretty much the same. Remarkable sweet, a smooth texture and yes, a little bit like Clean Dirt but only a tiny bit, and it complemented the cheese. I think the walnuts - or a bitter leaf like radicchio - might have improved it by cutting through the sweetness but it was still more of a success than I'd anticipated. 

Mark's verdict was Absolutely Delicious. Mine was Not Bad, Actually.

I don't think I'll be rushing to buy great bunches of the stuff, but as an occasional thing, slow roased beetroot is a nice surprise. 5 months from garden to plate, but I don't garden hoping for fast food.

A small plate for such a long project

As I have been putting away gardening things for the winter, I see I still have half a packet of crapaudine seeds. I might even plant them next year. 

Maybe.

* It was later voted best restaurant in the world, and I believe it. If you should ever stumble across a giant wad of money, I heartily reccomend spending it there, or Roots in York by the same team.

** Apologies to John and Yoko