Recipes of Experience

Apologies, I am two months behind in posts. I have been been crashing around the kitchen with mixed results. What have I learned? You should soak dried beans in salted water, but not boil them in salted water (I knew the last bit before). That was in aid of a cassoulet. 

I discovered Maison Riviera’s fromage blanc. I have used it in a number of pasta dishes where previously I have used a cheese such as mascarpone or mozzarella. The results are lighter and it blends easily, though I suggest you do it off heat.

Meanwhile Nigella Lawson’s cloud cake let me down for the first time this Easter. My egg whites and my whipping cream just didn’t want to froth to the occasion. It’s unsettling when a recipe you think you could make blindfolded blindsides you.

Speaking of which, I recently read something that hit me with the force of a right hook. More on this later, suffice it to say it was a truth I knew but didn’t acknowledge. 

In the kitchen, as in life, lately I have been reminded that left overs often outshine the first iteration. I made a mustard pork loin with apple lentils and herb aioli for my Oscar fete. It was good, but the sandwich I made with the last of the meat and aioli was great. For Easter I made a leg of lamb with preserved lemons. It’s another one of my go to celebration dishes, but as with the cloud cake I felt I didn’t quite pull it off. However, the Moroccan style stew with apricots that I made with the leftovers, that was outstanding.

A Bevy of Books

Because I can’t help hoping I will encourage someone to start reading poetry, I have to tell you about Wendy Cope’s Anecdotal Evidence. Funny and moving by turns, like every talented artist she brings into focus a moment you might otherwise have missed.

I think it is fair to say that one of the most complicated and enduring relationships every woman has is with food. If you agree you’ll enjoy Laura Shapiro’s What She Ate. She looks at six intriguing women, what food meant to them and how they used it.

Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know is her response to George Orwell’s Why I Write. For me, the first essay, Political Purpose, packed an incredible punch. We all cherish, often without knowing it, definitions of what it means to be good, what constitutes right, how we define our responsibilities, and so on. A great writer can make us aware of those assumptions, force us to examine them, and in the process, I know I risk hyperbole, but I will say it anyway, set us free. 

Ghosts, Yours, Mine and Ours

I thought the worst cold I would ever endure was a damp Christmas in a tiny Victorian two up two down, “heated” by a little fireplace with no flue. Then recently I set out on a walk I make several times a week. Unbidden my subconscious said to me, “Talk of your cold! Through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.” 

This sort of thing happens to me all the time, because I was lucky enough to have a poetry loving mother, to which I added a “useless” degree in English. Threads of poetry manifest themselves like wraiths drawn by a situation to which they are sympathetic. They whisper, like a reassuring friend, that I am not alone; the heartbreaking, the funny and the frigid are all shared experiences.

The Cremation of Sam McGee is a masterpiece blending high Boys’ Own ideals “Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code” - I remember my mother pausing to remark that that was very good - and low comedy: “I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked.”

Back to my frosty walk. My wind stung eyes watered and the tears froze to my lashes. I was en route to my first experience of frostbite. Luckily I had the wind at my back on my return trip, so it wasn’t serious. What was serious was the resulting need for carbs. I decided to make my first attempt at potato and cheddar perogies. 

I have loved these Ukrainian dumplings since I was first introduced to them, draped in caramelized onions, my first year at university. They are readily available frozen, but those are what a sun lamp is to Caribbean beach. I studied up by watching this Cook’s Country video.

I knew the filling would be easy, but the embracing dough worried me. It needn’t have.  It is wonderfully stretchy. I followed the recipe to the letter, or so I thought, but I used up my filling, made 28 dumplings and had quite a bit of surplus dough. I let it rest over night in the fridge before making another batch with a fresh round of filling.

They were marvellous. So good, the store bought ones I had in the freezer have been consigned to the bin. Only homemade for me from now on!

If that evening my door you’d opened wide, you’d have seen, I wore a smile you could see a mile and I’d have said, please pass the sour cream. Perogies and poetry, I hope I have persuaded you to indulge in both.

Speaking of ghosts

At the risk of boring you with tales of my mother, she, who had no particular liking for the great outdoors, had an abiding interest in mountain climbing, which I’ve never been able to go and figure. She would have loved Wade Davis’s Into the Silence, If you have read that or share my mother’s fascination with Alpine pursuits,  I think you will enjoy Michelle Paver’s Thin Air. 

Set in 1935, it follows a fictional attempt on the real, Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak. It alludes to the Mallory expedition which is the subject of Into the Silence, and makes vivid the physical and psychological strain of these climbs. I can’t help wondering if she took some inspiration from the phenomenon that Shackelton’s men experienced in the Antarctic “of the delusion that there was one more member (of the crew) than could actually be counted.” I only know of this because of the footnotes to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. A poem. Just sayin’.