It is that time of the year when even the grass has given up and the only plants showing green that are not being actively watered are those deep-rooted weeds it is impossible to be entirely rid of, the bindweed, nettles, teasel and ragwort (though this last has been stripped bare by caterpillars) that edge and criss-cross the plot, the plants of the hedgerow and my semi-cultivated bramble, two rows of it now, which each summer explodes out of its theoretical bounds, sending suckers across the path to my mother’s plot, across the other side to my neighbour’s plot, up and down my own to try and colonise the bean patch, the currant bushes. At one end is a thornless variety that fruits slightly earlier than its wilder cousin, slightly elongated berries with a warm and heady scent; enough today to eat a couple as I pick and take a little pot home to snack on. Although they seem to come earlier every year the main crop of blackberries are still a few weeks off at least; plenty coming, though, the thick vines heavy with flowers collapsing around green fruit. Because I spent so much of May and June away and also because of my general disorganisation I do not have any of the summer glut the rest of the allotment are dealing with, no tomatoes, no cucumbers and no courgettes to pick as often as possible and come up with recipes for and try to palm off on other people - I saw someone online describe this process as the “great courgette redistribution. Instead I have the late summer to look forward to, the summer of dark fruit and endless beans and squash to come, all to dry and pickle and bottle up against the future.

in the kitchen

Having said that I do still have the produce from our veg bag and from my mother’s surplus to use which has meant lots of dinners involving baked or fried or stewed and room temperature vegetables, such as

courgettes grated and salted and mixed with cheese and formed into kolokithokeftedes by my wife while I went and bought some pitta from the corner shop

aubergines and courgettes browned and chopped up and cooked in a sauce of tomato and red peppers alongside some olive oily smashed up new potatoes and a bit of monkfish wrapped in ham

aubergines and courgettes diced and deep-fried and mixed with raw tomato and garlic to go with pasta

while in the oven at the moment is an aubergine my wife has cut in half and stuffed with its flesh sautéed with anchovy, tomato, capers, and mixed with breadcrumbs

all of which are perfect now it isn’t quite so hot and it’s ok to have the oven on for a bit in the afternoon.

on the page

When Peninsula Press sent me a copy of Too Little, Too Hard it immediately got categorised as a bedside table book - reserved for non-fiction that I want to savour and take in properly rather than race through (my longstanding bedside table book being David Graeber’s Debt, which I have been in the process of reading for years). It is fascinating to see how the diverse selection of writers approach the idea of value in the creation of literature - whether that means the social value of political art, the artistic value of different forms of writing, the value which neoliberalism can extract from writers as content creators, the value to the writer in terms of the money they can actually make from their craft, or of course some combination of all of those things - especially (self-centredly) as I am in the middle of working out if and how I can make a living mostly as a writer. What could be a purely depressing read against the background of rampant authoritarianism and the dismantling of the arts and humanities in fact engages through its insistence on the power of collective action, organisation, and of literature itself to make a change for the better.

I am fascinating by the way that my fig tree is growing. It was planted a few years ago as a single bare stick - hardly worthy of being called a trunk - in the middle of the area at the top of my plot that I like to call the wildflower meadow which is in fact composed mainly of goldenrod and daffodils planted by a previous tenant, interspersed with oxeye daisies, the odd poppy and teasel, and the inevitable nettle and bramble coming up through it all. I cleared a space in the middle of this, dug a big hole, and we filled the hole with water before sticking the fig tree in the ground, refilling the hole, and tying the bare stick to an upright post, to make sure it didn’t get blown over. I’m not sure what variety it is except that it is supposed to be cold-hardy enough to withstand the British winter (such as it is), and that it shouldn’t grow higher than a couple of metres, to avoid falling foul of allotment rules; so far it is barely a few inches taller than the original stick. The first year some green shoots and leaves appeared at the top, and I thought it was growing well; these withered and died as soon as we had a cold spell. This was repeated, with new growth never coming from the withered top but always in new places further down the tree, until last year a new shoot came up from the ground, with larger leaves than the original growth had ever managed. Now there are at least three separate stalks, the tallest being the newest, and the whole thing is covered in leaves; it looks like it wants to become a broad shrub, not a tree at all, which is fine by me. I doubt I’ll ever get much fruit off it, at least not for many years, but even the best British figs are always slightly disappointing, and I’m much more enthused about the leaves as a flavour anyway, a kind of toasted coconut I’ve been obsessed with for years. I haven’t made “my” fig leaf wine for ages, although I might now I have my own leaves to put in there. If you follow that recipe, by the way, then halve or even quarter the amount of sugar - I don’t know what I was thinking honestly.

in the kitchen

Often when I want a good simple treat I will get a chicken from the butcher or the farmers market and roast it, make a few salads or vegetable sides and have a feast. Then we have chicken salad the next day, chicken broth, etc etc. Now in the midst of what I have seen called our third heatwave of the summer but which seems to me to just be one very hot summer I was craving this meal but obviously had no intention of turning the oven on. So instead I poached the chicken in water with the greens of a spring onion, some garlic, one nice carrot, and a rogue piece of ginger, and while it was resting in its broth very simply prepared some things picked that morning from the allotment - freshly dug Red Rocket potatoes (boiled whole and dressed with melted butter and lots of black pepper), a little gem (from my mother’s plot) that I just cut up and refreshed in ice water and dried and put on the table with half a lemon and salt and olive oil so we could dress it as we liked, and a cucumber (also from my mother’s plot) simply semi-peeled and cut into sticks to dip into salt. Obviously there was lots of mayo on the side, and now we have chicken for salad and lots of broth that I think is light enough to have chilled, one of these evenings, while the weather is still hot.

on the page

The principle of the book-hoarder, as I have said before, is that sometimes you might buy or otherwise acquire and keep a book for a long time before you get around to reading it, and when you do you will often find that now is exactly the right time for you to be reading it, appreciating it more than you would have done had you read it when you first bought it or were given it. Faber sent me a proof of Hannah French’s The Rolling Year: Listening to the Seasons with Vivaldi last August, and while I do normally try to read books I am sent like this in a fairly timely fashion for some reason I put it aside - possibly because I was then still very much wrapped up in my own seasonal book, and didn’t want to be distracted by something with potential resonances, I don’t remember. Anyway, the other week I picked up a novel by Harriet Constable called The Instrumentalist, about the orchestra of foundlings that Vivaldi worked with / exploited throughout his career, and having read and enjoyed it I thought I would come back to French’s book. I have to confess I’ve always thought of The Four Seasons as rather slight background-y music but was happy to be disabused of this notion by French, who very adeptly places the music firmly in the context of the Venetian seasons as Vivaldi would have lived them - summer as a time of overbearing heat and drought interspersed with brutal storms, the stark winters of the Little Ice Age - and also strips away the accumulated layers of familiarity and of modern orchestration to view the concertos as they first appeared, very physical, wildly virtuosic little Baroque puzzles.

Between heatwave and thunderstorm everything has grown an almost unbelievable amount since last week so that for a minute I doubted myself, had to check my calendar to make sure I had in fact been here, cut the grass, picked this and that. I realise that parts of my plot which are supposed to be paths between beds have become impassable, either covered in weeds or grown up into dense tuffets that resist cutting. So before I do anything else I go around with the strimmer, cutting swathes through grass and plantain and nettle, even as I tell myself that each of these little patches must be an ideal habitat for something or other; our allotment committee are more lenient than many, I think, but they must have their limit, and I suspect that grass taller than I am blowing its seed across everyone else’s plots might be approaching it. So down everything goes, and might make good hay if we had the space to dry and store it, and if the rain wasn’t coming and going in smattering bursts. That done it is time to pull up the broad beans, regretting once again that the last few have rotted in the rain or been eaten by slugs or birds or mice before I had a chance to save and dry them, marvelling once again at the strange white nodules on the roots which perform the plants’ role as nitrogen fixers, intermediaries between the mineral and organic, the air and the earth. I turn the soil over the way a pig or a chicken might, smooth it into a fine-ish tilth, make a line for a row of chard seeds, a series of holes for cucuzza, the climbing Sicilian squash. With no tomatoes or cucumbers or courgettes growing (a mix of failed seeds and my own disorganisation) I am placing my hopes on these later-summer harvests, gambling that the season will not collapse entirely into rain before its heat is over.

in the kitchen

While I do love arrangements of cold meat and salads, light dinners of this and that, and plates of simply dressed pasta eaten as close to the window as possible to catch at least a little breeze, it is something of a relief to be able to cook again - last night I even turned the oven on to grill / roast some skewers of fat prawns marinated in lemon, garlic, chilli and oregano and a splash of ouzo (a nice cold cucumber salad and a tepid stew of the first allotment potatoes and the last allotment artichokes on the side) while the day before we’d had a fully braised dinner, my wife’s family recipe of tegoline in tecia (green beans cooked to the point of total collapse with rosemary, garlic and meat broth) alongside a couple of chunks of lamb on the bone cooked with spring onion, olives and a splash of cider - sticky and delicious.

on the page

After getting a bit stuck with my reading (I still haven’t finished Adam Bede) I picked up two very different books both of which I read quickly and greedily. First Eli Davies’ The Spinster Cookbook, a series of memoir-essay-recipe pieces which position spinsterhood as a rejection not of romantic life but rather of conventional domesticity, muddying the idea of cooking for one as wholesome self-care with an insistence on hedonism and appetite and building to a utopian exploration of different, more solitary and yet more communal ways of living than are allowed by our current insistence on the couple and the nuclear family as our basic unit of existence. Explicitly in dialogue with writers like Rebecca May Johnson and her dream of canteens, it also made me think of the book The Green Ages and its chapters on communal living, reminders that the way our society is currently organised is by no means inevitable or natural. I also read Riddley Walker, after literally decades of my brothers and probably other people telling me I should read it, and am sorry to have to report that they were right all along, which is all I have to say about that incredibly rich and strange book for the time being.

Read more

I return from a couple of weeks away to find everything run riot. Although my mother has trimmed the grass (worried I might otherwise get a letter of warning from the committee, who have been doing their annual inspections to check that all plots are under cultivation) it has shot up again, going to seed in places, as is the clover, the vetch, and the plantain, the nettle, the lovage which is taller than me and covered in beetles - there is much to be done. The leaves of the garlic are turning to rust so I carefully lever the bulbs out of the earth cracked by their swelling, now dotted with the beans I sowed between them, alternating rows of borlotti and a flat yellow bean called Marvel of Venice, both saved from last year’s pods or the year before’s. I have to soak the earth with four watering cans worth of water to make it soft enough to get my beanpoles in, a frame of bamboo and string for the plants to climb up in that strange intelligent way they do, swaying this way and that in their quest upwards. My cucumbers which last year did so well have not germinated at all, or if they have then they have been entirely eaten by some animal or another, so the earth there gets a hopeful soaking in a last-ditch effort to wake the seeds up; if there is no sign next week I will stick something else in the ground. The solstice past, we have moved into summer’s second stage - I cut what will probably be the last artichokes of the year, leave the last broad beans on their plants to dry out and save for seed, dig up the first few potatoes and pick the first handful of currants. At the top of the plot, the little fig tree is blowsy and glorious, leaves sprouting from the original wood, from the second shoot it put up last year, in new shoots from the ground, flopping everywhere, their scent an echo of the heat to come.

in the kitchen

It is very hard to find the motivation to cook anything, both because of the heat and because my wife is still in Italy, and it never seems worth the effort to make a nice meal just for myself; tempting just to live on ice cream and takeaways, but I resist the urge and subsist instead on little bachelor meals of an omelette with some kimchi, or rice with sautéed broad beans and little chunks of liver sausage and cheese, or duck broth from the freezer seasoned with fresh chilli and garlic and bulked out with stewed courgettes and a handful of passatelli also from the freezer, a bowl of brown deliciousness in some ways entirely unsuited to the weather, but also somehow perfect. Other than that I have been pickling, in my capacity as Open School East’s Community Cook, working with their youth programme to make canapés for the opening of the school’s degree show - sauerkraut and rosemary oil on Peter’s Yard crackers, little skewers of pickled beetroot and snaked-over dilly beans described affectionately by a friend as nightmarish.

on the page

There is something very pleasurable about finally reading a classic not because you should but because you really want to, and finding that it is exceptional. I hadn’t read any Isabel Allende at all, shamefully, but picked up The House of The Spirits from the charity shop on the assumption it would be a good holiday book to really get stuck into, which of course it was - nobody needs me to tell them how brilliant Allende is, the book’s beguiling mix of woozy spiritualism and shocking brutality.

May’s heatwave past, the weather has broken into fragments, never quite hot but certainly warm enough to work up a sweat under the raincoat made necessary by the occasional downpour, heavy drops of rain as warm as tears which feel solid on the skin and set the leaves of the raspberries and the lemonbalm dancing with the comical speed of clouds in a time-lapse video; between the heat and the rain everything has shot up, tall grass borders crowding against the netting covering the currant bushes, the few spears of asparagus which last week were barely poking out of the soil now erupted into ferns, their season nearly done. As always at this time of year I am surprised by the sudden speed of everything after the long wait of winter - one day I am waiting desperately for something to grow, the next I am wondering where on earth I will sow my summer crops, I have no space for courgettes or for tomatoes or for squash until I pull that bed up or dig over this or until the broad beans are finished. Today I pick a bucket full of them with still more on the plant, and another handful of artichokes too, and am grateful that we finally bought a freezer so that not every meal must consist of broad beans; despite attempts at broad bean miso I have not found a better way of preserving them than podding and freezing or else drying, at the end of the season, when they begin to get large and floury - not long for that now.

in the kitchen

Last week my wife and I hosted a supperclub at Madre bakery which we called Il Pane di Ieri, yesterday’s bread, themed around breadcrumbs and stale bread and the general idea of leftovers. We cooked:

Scotch quail eggs (made with a polpette di pane mix for the vegetarians)

Baked mussels stuffed with seasoned breadcrumbs (baked artichokes for the vegetarians)

Little squares of rye bread smeared with goat cheese and topped with raw little broad beans

the passatelli I tested last week (pasta made with breadcrumbs, egg and grated cheese) with duck & duck offal ragu (with artichokes and green garlic for the vegetarians)

Mocha bread and butter pudding made with Madre’s (award-winning!) chocolate sourdough and custard flavoured with Camp coffee extract

and served some of my ROVO liqueurs afterwards - nocino, “clemencello” - like limoncello but made with very good leafy clementines. (I’ll be selling both of these later in the year btw).

This was all excellent and we had a great time but were also, thanks to a slight miscalculation on my part, left with rather more duck than we needed for our guests. So the last few days have been a duck-processing party - rendering all the bits down for fat, making broth with all the carcasses, confiting two spare legs, freezing two spare breasts, distributing leftover ragu to family members - a celebration of leftovers producing more leftovers, a cyclical way of cooking.

on the page

Book-wise I have mainly concerned with my own forthcoming Allotment Diaries as we gear up towards the release, and I have certainly been involved in more email chains than ever before in my non-office-working life; Adam Bede has mainly been put to one side for the time being. After the allotment my mother lent me Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play. Although I am sure I only noticed a tiny fraction of the references to classic and forgotten crime fiction that my mother (an Agatha Christie obsessive) found in the book I did find it brilliant, a bravura postmodern-literary-puzzle-unflinching-examination-of-grief-affectionate-genre-pastiche, a mystery that is not a mystery, a detective story with no crime committed, often funny and devastatingly sad.

Officially a heatwave, with one record-breakingly hot May day immediately followed by another one, and we find ourselves in not quite the hottest part of it finishing the construction of my mother’s prefab compost bins out of posts and boards that turn out, in the preceding days of rain and hail and then record-breaking heat, to have warped rather badly and need hammering into place rather than slotting neatly together as they should; I am glad we building it next to the hedge, despite unwanted attention from the brambles and nettles, as even in the shade sweat is beading down my forehead to drip down my nose and off into the soil, the sun above like a fever. That done I don’t have a great deal of energy for anything else, certainly not to trim all the grass that needs trimming or to weed all the weeds that need weeding; I scrabble and rootle a few holes in bare soil to sow saved seeds of cucumber Middle East Peace, climbing bean Marvel of Venice and borlotti of some kind, and I pick a big bagful of the larger broad beans, the first glut of the year, at least the same again still swelling on the plants and no sign yet (touch wood, ward off the evil eye) of blackfly. I cut the first few little artichokes and pull up a stem of green garlic to go with them, although unfortunately there is no asparagus ready to make a little home-grown vignarola. The bed needs a good water, to be honest, which I do not do - not because it is too hot at this time of day to water (although it absolutely is) but just because I completely forget, thoughts frazzled by the heat

.

in the kitchen

Because of the heat (did I mention the heat?) I have been thinking about dinners which either don’t need the oven on or which can be baked and then left to go tepid while we go out for a walk and the flat cools down. One day we have a warmish salad of charred cauliflower, bulghur wheat and gem lettuce with slices of fried halloumi, the next I decide to make a quiche / flan (I make it in a rectangular enamel pie dish and it’s quite deep, with thick pastry, which feels like it disqualifies it from proper quiche-hood) with leeks and bacon and comté and cheddar (English cheese surely disqualifies it from quiche-hood) and Parmesan, which we have with a big salad (more gem, shredded red cabbage and carrot) and little glasses of cold fizzy wine. I’m testing passatelli for an event we’re doing on Saturday, both the recipe for the dough and the use of an electric meat grinder to shape the fat worms of breadcrumb and eggs and cheese, so we’ll have those for dinner; just a pan of boiling water required, and a little pan to cook some of my allotment broad beans for the condimento.

on the page

If I’m honest the flan / quiche was inspired not just by the weather but also by Thea Everett’s Substack post from 3 years ago which somehow came to my attention and especially by reading Theresa Präauer’s Cooking In The Wrong Century (translated by Eleanor Updegraff), a strange little novel about hosting and socialising and hospitality which tells the story of an intimate dinner party in stops and starts, rewinding and replaying the evening with variations minor and major (one guest or another is fashionably late, embarrassingly late, charming, rude, it wraps up early, it goes on late, the police arrive, is there an orgy?) but which all involve the same menu, centred on a classic Quiche Lorraine for which you could pick up the recipe, if you wanted to, dotted around on pages between chapters / retellings, bacon, leek & onion, gruyere (they didn’t have gruyere at Tesco hence my comté), eggs, cream, pastry enriched unlike mine with an egg, and around several bottles of crémant, cheaper than Champagne, chicer than the supermarket prosecco we had with ours.

T-shirt weather, at last, and time to cut back the grass and pull the weeds that have shot up and around in the two weeks I have been away, the creeping buttercup trying to take back the asparagus bed, the nettles interspersed with the artichoke leaves, vetch and plantain coming up next to two hazelnut striplings between the clusters of wild garlic, collapsing now into the earth to wait for next spring. I strim the grass as close as I can, leave clumps of clover as they are (good for the soil, I think, and they would be good for pigs too, if this were an ideal mixed smallholding and not a council allotment), cover the weeds in the asparagus over with a layer of compost, pull some up from around the onions - grass, thistle, dandelion - and throw them back down to cover the bare soil between the rows of potatoes, themselves still half-covered in the rhubarb leaves & comfrey my mother put down to protect against the forecast frost; the cold seems to have got to the asparagus, one spear half-dead with the same green limpness you get in vegetables pushed to the back of the fridge, frozen and stuck. I am about halfway down my plot when it begins to rain, although it passes in five minutes, and halfway through another task (helping my mother put together a compost bin) when it begins to hail. Even though this too passes fairly quickly, when it stops it is no longer T-shirt weather and the warm earth is turned into sticky clay; I abandon all thoughts of picking elderflowers and try a bit more strimming, the grass steaming in the sudden sun. We are right on the edge of the gluts of summer, the broad beans heavy with pods not quite filled out, the artichokes full of flowerbuds just peeking out, if you dodge the nettles and fold aside the giant thistle’s silver leaves.

in the kitchen

While I was away I was mostly being cooked for - and cooked for very well - which is never something to complain about, but it was pleasant after a week to meet up with our friends Rachel and Gaia and go shopping in Testaccio market with not much more of a plan than something-with-mussels and let’s-see-what-looks-good, which resulted in asparagus and peas and lovely fresh onions and apricots and cherries and a morning sat together podding peas and picking mussels and chopping things and drinking coffee and trying some mortadella and some cheese before a lunch of

a loose risotto of asparagus and peas, like risi e bisi but with asparagus and without ham

a tiella of mussels, rice, and potatoes (recipe testing for Rachel)

mussels stuffed with breadcrumbs and celery (recipe testing for us)

boiled asparagus with melted butter

cherries afterwards, to be shared with the tortoise

and I thought again how nice it is to have a big table in the same place as the cooking is being done, so that it is shared like this, the kitchen the centre of the house instead of banished somewhere backstage.

on the page

My usual habit when I travel is to buy two or three paperbacks from the WH Smiths at the airport (depending on whether they are doing three for the price of two or buy one get one half price) to read throughout my holiday or just at the airport if the plane is delayed enough; in an effort to spend less money I went instead to the charity bookshop the day before flying and was pleased to find what I thought was a Natalia Ginzburg novel that hadn’t yet been released in the current run of new editions from Daunt Books; it was only after reading quite a few pages (in my defence, I was very tired) that I realised that that The Things We Used To Say was in fact an older and rather freer (at least in its title) translation of Lessico Famigliare, which I had read before as Family Lexicon in Jenny McPhee’s translation. A somewhat disorientating experience, to read almost the same book again, to be distracted by its differences in vocabulary and exposition, shocked again by the book’s quiet heartbreak, the understatement of its trauma.

Still not that much to do, at this time of the year, except to do what you can to keep the things that you do not want to grow from overwhelming the things that you do - the creeping buttercup, teasels, thistles, nettles coming in from everywhere, grass coming in from the pathways and the patches between beds to colonise the open soil - and to keep the things that you do want to grow in the places you are trying to grow them in, to stop the brambles and raspberries from sending out shoots and suckers everywhere, the fennel from seeding itself in the most unlikely places; no, not much to do except to take the strimmer round the plot and see what is happening and where - the bear’s garlic flowering and going to seed, the currants in bud, the blackberries not doing much of anything (the yearly panic as to whether I pruned away the right branches or not), the garlic plumping up nicely, the broad beans in full flower and looking very happy, swaying in the wind against their loose support of twine and bamboo. I see the first ant crawling up one of the stalks and take that as my cue to pinch out the tops, the dense little clusters which can harbour the aphids the ants farm and which also (suitably washed of insect life) make very good little fritters, a simple tempura batter and hot oil and salt and lemon. I cut a big bunch of the fennel I am now fairly sure is Sicilian fennel grown from some of the seed we were given as a wedding gift rather than self-seeded with the rest, and I cut the two (two!) stalks of asparagus which are up, but leave all the nettles where they are; next week I am doing a residency in Abruzzo around the theme of nettles and will have (I assume) my fill of them.

in the kitchen

Although my own broad bean tops are still sitting in the fridge in a plastic bag we did make fritters last week as described above with broad bean tops from the community gardens and had them for a light dinner as wraps in fluffy pitta with salad also from the community gardens, spring onions and mayo (tahini or yoghurt would have been better but we didn’t have them), hot crunchy oily leaves against cool crunchy lemony leaves, very satisfying. The big bunch of fennel once blanched in boiling water and drained and squeezed and finely chopped turned into a small fistful of fennel to add to sausagemeat and onion and stew down for a pasta sauce; the two stalks of asparagus will probably form part of a breakfast tomorrow or the day after, maybe with the broad bean tops in a frittata although I have just remembered that I have forgotten to buy eggs and we are out. I like this time of the year when the plot produces these little harvests, enough for a seasoning or an accent here and there; soon enough the broad beans will provide the first of the year’s gluts (if you don’t count the nettles) and the allotment will begin to dictate what we eat and preserve and put in the freezer - as it should do.

on the page

In between trying to read my way through all the books I got for my birthday (John & Paul which was lovely, a book about the Venetian publishing industry which was very interesting if comically full of typos for a book about the publishing industry, Elizabeth Alker’s book about contemporary classical music and pop which I am about a third through and am enjoying immensely) I picked up a short book from my bookshelf called In The Pines or possibly in the pines, a book which I had bought ages ago for some reason I forget (I imagine I picked it up initially for the Lead Belly / Nirvana reference and was then intrigued by the premise) but had left unread until now; as is so often the case I am glad I did so, as I don’t think the past me that originally bought the book would quite have appreciated its blend of fragments of narrative with the evocative photographs which dot the pages, tintype prints taken in the field, neither medium quite illustrating or illuminating the other but instead combining into a peculiar whole.

Although you might still leave the house in glorious sunshine, duck into a shop to avoid a freezing shower, and walk home into a brisk wind - although the weather is still very much fickle the air itself is warm enough and there has been so much rain over the winter that everything now is shooting up tense and green; the broad beans a mass of flowers and buds, the nettles exploding from the hedgerows, the bronze feathers of the fennel in dense little bushes, the lovage beginning its yearly climb from soil-level to the height of my shoulder, and for the first time there are one, two, three, enough spears of asparagus up at the same time to be worth picking and tying into one little bunch. We have nurtured the plants for years, my wife planting the straggly roots in a trench I had dug for them, years of watering and vainly weeding and building up their bed with manure and compost and keeping an eye out for the asparagus beetles that are apparently such a pest. In a probably forlorn attempt to keep the creeping buttercup out of the bed I have raised it up a little with wattled-but-undaubed walls of hazel and willow twigs (freer draining, I thought, which I believe they like), the only bed on my plot to be distinguished in this way, and I am glad that the plants are enjoying their new status, there are more spears on the way, ready for next week perhaps. I realise that I have nowhere to plant the seed potatoes that I bought and left chitting at my mother’s house and slightly begrudgingly dig over the only currently free bed I have, two-thirds of a space partly taken up by the sprawling cardoon and some apparently self-seeded onions. Kneeling in the soil picking stones out of the tilth I am surprised by movement in the plants next to me, a little lizard that several people who know about lizards tell me is a Common Lizard, Zootoca vivipara, who sits calmly for a few photographs before scuttling off into the deeper shade of the cardoon.

in the kitchen

The first asparagus I ate this year was at the newish restaurant Franc in Canterbury, a late birthday lunch with my twin and our partners; for a starter, four spears of asparagus and a dollop of bright green wild garlic hollandaise adorned with the white star of a wild garlic flower and nothing else, exactly how I want to eat the first green shoots of the season - of the year. My own few spears are barely even enough to do this with, and anyway I can’t really see myself making a little plate of asparagus and hollandaise for myself at home. Instead I sauté the chopped-up spears with spring onion and lovage and scramble in a couple of eggs and eat it with a couple of chunks of sourdough. Eggs of course are very good at taking on and somehow stretching out the flavours of things you put with them and so are good for making something approximating a meal out of a little luxury, like the end bit of some good ham, or a scrap of fresh truffle, or the first produce of a long-nurtured asparagus bed.

on the page

I hadn’t read a really good chunky novel for a long time and so I really enjoyed getting my teeth into Q, a cloak-and-dagger blockbuster thriller set during the Reformation and its associated peasant uprisings, written by an Italian anarchist collective under the name of an 1980s footballer, Luther Blissett; perhaps unsurprisingly, Umberto Eco was briefly assumed to be behind the project. There is always something very pleasing about being able to immerse yourself so completely in a book which spans both decades and over 600 pages, and which happily switches between theological nuance, bawdy humour, swashbuckling battles, and a lengthy disquisition on banking and the smoke-and-mirrors nature of money itself.

I am getting more and more interested in non-edible uses of ferments - at home I made another batch of red cabbage sauerkraut (2% salt, some fennel and caraway seed) and put all of the outer leaves and cores and stuff into a crock of water. As their dye seeps out the rapidly souring liquid (uncontrolled by any salt) turns it from purple to a bright pink which does not look natural; reducing the liquid by half fills the flat with the smell of braised cabbage but produces a surprisingly colour-fast ink. The ink also smells of braised cabbage but there’s not much to be done about that. You could get the same effect without fermenting the infusion by adding a bit of vinegar, of course, but I like to see it happen naturally.

I’m still very new to all this - the first I heard anything about fermented vegetable developers was from a filmmaker called Toby Parker Rees who got in touch with me a few years ago to say

“I'd like to make a short portrait film about you and your approach to pickling things. I'd also like to pickle the film.”

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It is sunny, yes, but when the wind blows it is cold, very cold; only yesterday coming back from town I walked into a hailstorm, the picture-frame I was carrying pushing me around like the sails of a windmill. Here the bucket which I had placed over those little stalks of accidentally-forced asparagus has blown off into my next-door neighbour’s plot - I have to retrieve it from among her raised beds, feeling like a trespasser - and one of my chairs has tumbled into the netting protecting my broad beans from rodents. Thankfully nothing is crushed but still I take this as my cue to remove the netting which soon the bean plants will be pushing against, they are long past the stage where a passing mouse might nip straight through their stalk or make off entirely with the seed-bean itself and I do not want to come back in a week and find that the netting was fine enough for aphids to enter but too fine for ladybirds to get in and eat them. The plants are coming into white-and-purple flower and I find myself thinking how good my crop will be, superstitiously forcing the thought from my mind. Other than picking another bagful of nettles there is not much to attend to; there is a big pile of ash on a nearby plot left from a communal weekend session of burning the accumulated prunings of winter, and I scoop some up and sprinkle a little on my compost, a little round the fig tree and around my fruit bushes, and put some in a bottle with some rainwater, for what purpose exactly I’m not sure.

in the kitchen

Now that the weather has been getting warmer I suddenly remember all of the cold-weather cooking I haven’t got around to doing over the winter; the cold winds and smatterings of rain and hail give me an excuse to indulge. Toad-in-the-hole, one day, my second attempt to convince my Italian wife of the validity of this dish (my first attempt, years ago, a sad and lumpen thing of dense and unrisen batter). This one puffs up well but our slightly malfunctioning hob and a moment of inattention on my part burn the gravy I have spent an hour on (slowly slowly caramelising onions, mainly) and so I cannot call it an unqualified success. Rather better is a lasagna made the next day, meatless but with wild garlic pesto and bechamel and twaróg1 cheese in between several layers of pasta, somehow fresh and quite light for a big dish of baked pasta, with lemon-dressed rocket on the side.

on the page

Having a studio to write and mess around with photography in means that I have another space to leave books in and so I now have on the go at any one time

a sofa book (could be anything)

a bedside book (non-fiction)

a backpack book (for reading on the train)

a studio book (research or work related)

and I therefore feel like I am reading very slowly, a chapter here and a chapter there; my bedside book, for example, David Graeber’s Debt, I think I have been reading for over a year. My most recently finished sofa book is Patrick Harpur’s The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, a very readable and occasionally infuriating attempt to recenter the creative imagination within Western thought; the kind of book which (even if you don’t entirely agree with it) sparks resonances everywhere, making you look in a different way at everything else you are reading or watching or that you encounter.

Hi all! As you may have seen on Instagram (perhaps that’s why you’re here!) from September I will be running an online writing course called Grounding Your Words - 8 weekly sessions designed to help you develop your writing practice and build the craft of observation into your fiction or non-fiction.

Each week we’ll look at a different aspect of creative writing craft and use film, images, texts, found objects and the world around us as prompts for short exercises to work on together. Writing can be lonely, all in the head; here is a chance to ground it in collaboration.

For more info and to buy tickets have a look here; for the first week of sales you can get a 10% discount using the code EARLYDOORS at checkout. I hope to see some of you there!

After weeks and months of dormancy suddenly there is so much to do - and for the time being not much to show for it. The grass needs cutting and is finally dry enough to do so; the weeds encroaching from the hedgerows and the grassy spaces between beds are threatening to overrun the plants I am trying to grow; the framework holding the bramble vaguely in place needs remaking, their shoots need tying in, the compost bins need rebuilding, the hazel should have been pruned weeks ago, the patches of earth left fallow over winter now look at me accusingly, ready for turning, to take in new life. Meanwhile the idea of any actual crop is still far off; my wild garlic patch probably needs leaving for another year, and the broad beans which will make the first harvest have yet to even flower. A corner of the sheet of corrugated plastic that has been lying around on the plot since I dried my garlic and onions on it last summer has blown on top of the asparagus bed, and underneath it (sadly somewhat corroded by slugs) two spears of white asparagus have forced themselves up into the dark. Still, nothing seems like a chore when it is warm and when the air smells like this, full of blossom and grass and herbs, when each plant is full enough of life that knocking or kneeling upon one brings up a great heady scent, intoxicating.

in the kitchen

The other week the first crop of nettles - just a tiny bag of shoots - were cooked as planned as creamed nettles to go with a roast chicken, a favourite preparation of greens; just blanch them and then sauté in butter, stir in flour to make a roux, add milk and cream and season with nutmeg as well as salt and black pepper, something between a sauce (in flavour and texture it is not unlike traditional bread sauce) and a side. The chicken was rubbed with rosemary salt, chilli, oregano and lemon zest and roasted on a wire rack over a tray of thickly sliced potatoes with a slick of olive oil until the skin was crispy and the legs pulled away from the body and the potatoes were swimming in chicken juices, browned on top and fudgey underneath; as well as the nettles we had a salad of mixed leaves (heavy on the mustard) from the community gardens. There weren’t quite as many leftovers as I had planned but the bones and skin and bits went into a pot with the usual suspects to make a broth, some of which we froze in an ice cube tray and some of which I made into a soup with thinly sliced leeks and carrots and barley and the leftover chicken, somewhere between a cock-a-leekie and a soup we had once in the Sudtirol of chicken broth and barley and diced carrot and nothing else, perfect for the somewhere-between season we have just left.

on the page

Although I am still trying to read my way through books that I already own rather than acquire any new ones I was lent a couple of proofs to look at, of Rebecca Parry’s May We Feed The King and Rebecca Tamás’ The Book of Mysteries, both of which I had been eagerly anticipating. The first is a strange, elliptical sort of historical novel, shifting between a present day Curator of the displays of food and homewares you get in the museums of castles and stately homes and a presumably-medieval king, a reluctant and improbable (third son, no other heirs) ruler of a realm unnamed and not clearly defined. In fact few of the broader strokes of the book are clearly defined, its characters known only by their titles or job descriptions, the tragedy which has befallen the Curator not clearly spelled out; instead it accumulates itself in fine detail, like the exact prices and construction of the plastic foodstuffs the Curator decorates her sets with. Tamás’ book is marvellous, an attempt to restructure a modern life around something more fundamental than the clock time of 9-5 we have burdened ourselves with, its collision of ancient religion and modern paganism with radical politics and ecological thinking a natural continuation of her essays in Strangers. A slightly off-kilter trip through the calendar, dealing also with the shock of grief, it was hard not to think of it in productive conversation with The Allotment Diaries; several times while reading it I wished I could revisit and rewrite my own book in light of new thoughts, but of course that ship has sailed.

March 19th is also nearly the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and many of the Sicilian venerations have something older and more pagan about them, marking this turning point of the year; three-tiered altars piled high with breads left in sacrifice to the saint to be distributed ultimately to the poor, elaborately shaped and woven to resemble figures, sheafs of wheat, hands, ladders, with baskets of fruits and vegetables, the first harvest of the new season rubbing up with the stored produce of the last. In particular in Sicily they make the maccu or minestra di San Giuseppe, a soup that is also a spell - Mary Taylor Simeti calls it a propitiatory ritual2, an attempt to guarantee this year’s harvest through a deliberate sacrifice of the last. It is a soup that embodies the particular Christian quality of recklessness, of putting one’s faith in Providence, an act of lavish poverty.

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It smells of spring as much as it feels like it, the smell I suppose of pollen drifting in the air, of cut grass, the sharp scent of nettles as you approach the edges of the plot, and it is warm enough to work in just a t-shirt, knees muddy in the soil to - finally, after the torpor of winter - neaten and weed and tidy, pulling patches of chickweed and grass out from among the wild garlic and the bed of sleeping asparagus, tut at the creeping buttercup which spreads its way right through the soil, dump the other weeds back on top in the hope that their shade will choke it out; warm enough when my back starts to ache to just sit a while in the sun and to carry on whittling a length of hazel into something I am thinking of as a pilgrim’s staff. There is frogspawn among the wire netting covering my mother’s pond in her plot next door, birdsong in the hedges and, as I squat to pick a bagful of new nettle tips, the first greens of the year, to blanch and have creamed with roast chicken, the sound in the orchard beyond of an argument between a walker and a dog-walker, who like many dog owners seems to believe that rules about leads and control and so forth apply to every other dog except their own - all the sounds and signs of spring.

in the kitchen

Last week I picked three or so stalks of the rhubarb that was knocking over its blanching bucket and when I got home chopped it and macerated it with sugar and cooked it very gently in a little water, jewel-pink and tender. This is a good sort of preliminary thing to do with rhubarb, it keeps quite well while you are thinking what else you might do with it, but often I get no further than that, unable to decide what exactly should be its final form; a cake, a crumble, stirred through braised pork or duck for a little sweet-sour tang? Luckily my wife is more proactive about such things than I am and goes and buys a pot of cream to whip for a rhubarb fool, sweetened with the syrup from some candied ginger, and some chocolate and ginger biscuits to go with it. This we eat from the little silver ice-cream bowls we keep for eating such things from while watching Small Prophets and I remember how nice whipped cream can be, with some sharp fruit to set it off.

on the page

Sometimes - I am sure I have said this before - sometimes a book you have either bought and left on a shelf or picked up and put down on several occasions at a bookshop suddenly appeals to you and you ferret it out or buy it and realise you are reading it at just the right time, that you would not have really appreciated it as much as you do now had you read it when you first bought it or when it first came out. This happened twice this week, with Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence (picked up and put down on several occasions at a bookshop) and Jane Reichhold’s Writing and Enjoying Haiku, both of which made me think about short bursts of language rather than more lengthy structures in a way I hadn’t consciously done in a while as well as (along with Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, also bought-but-not-read a while ago) how I will go about teaching the craft and practice of writing when I begin to offer classes, as I intend to later this year.

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One really warm, sunny day, and we act as though winter is blown away for ever, that winter of endless rain and grey skies that kept me skulking indoors for most of February. Now here on a cooler day, with vague gusts of rain or really just damp air threatening, you can see the warmth coming through the soil, everything pushing upwards, awake at last after winter’s torpor; the broad beans are big and sturdy, fluttering in the wind, some onions I don’t remember planting have appeared in the fallow bed next to the cardoon, and the upturned bucket I had placed over my rhubarb has been knocked sideways by the growth of the stalks upwards in search of light. Spring, yes, spring is here, it seems, with all of its hope and its plans, but as I dig a whole to plant out a little pot of lemonbalm I see how the wet winter is still there in the soil, the heavy clumps of clay which come out and stick to everything, gloves and tools and trousers. Patience, a little longer, first let the daffodils pass and the nettles run riot and hope that the sun persists.

in the kitchen

Away from the daily routine of a restaurant kitchen I find it is very easy to get into a habit of not cooking, I never really eat breakfast anyway and lunch can be a bought sandwich or something eaten on the go or if I am packing myself a lunch for the studio then an odd assortment of leftovers and picky bits, a boiled egg, a piece of cheese, some of that daikon kimchi, cold rice, pasta salad, smoked mackerel, a piece of pork pie, some crackers, four radishes, a pear; whenever I go through a phase like this I worry that I am forgetting how to cook properly - how to dice, slice, sweat, braise, season - and am not particularly disabused of this worry by a solo dinner I make of leek and cabbage orzo, the vegetables finely sliced and sweated soft in olive oil with a little caraway, some ham stock from the freezer added along with a parmesan rind and then the pasta cooked directly in the resulting soup to which, forgetting that the ham stock is very salty, I add a big pinch of salt and then burn my tongue tasting it anyway and eat the whole panful more to dispose of the evidence than out of any particular hunger or enjoyment.

on the page

It says something still about the state of the canon and all the prejudices it involves conscious or otherwise that despite studying American Literature and specifically the Beats and their offshoots for a number of years I had never (I thought) read much or any Diane di Prima, although I did recognise a few bits of Dinners and Nightmares I must have seen quoted or anthologised somewhere, the menstrual stew, the very good indeed iced coffee, the artist who will stick to landscapes and still life. In any case it is the kind of writing to make you immediately feel you know the writer well, carelessly intimate and confessional, her lost bohemian New York City of meals scraped together or feasts luxuriated in, at home, in diners, in cold apartments with friends and disappointing lovers.

I started this Substack largely out of necessity, as a replacement for my Tinyletter when that platform announced they were shutting up shop, but I knew when I did so that I wanted my posts here to be rather different from those sent out as psychogastronomy - notes towards something rather than polished little pieces in their own right, covering less physical ground than the previous travel letters, but maybe more mentally or thematically; a jumble of books, plants, pickles and dishes. I am not a natural note-taker, but I realised I needed these notes because I was writing a sort of testament.

Three years ago when my father died I began to write an account of the allotment which quickly became an account of him - the two inextricable - and the year we spent working more or less side by side, me on my half-plot and him on his, an account of family rituals, recipes, plants and seeds swapped and shared, of the life in the soil; a book that I needed to write, however hard it felt. Although taking place before this I started writing leaf / notes, the writing of it was fed and watered by the weekly practice of writing here, and the space that it gave me to think about growth, grief, the churn of the seasons. I am very pleased to be able to say that this book will be published in August as The Allotment Diaries, and that you can pre-order it now from all of the usual places.

My father was a keen fan of both folk music and of taping things off the radio, so I’ve also put together a mixtape of songs which were important to him or which are mentioned in the book or which I listened to while writing it (or all three) which you can listen to here.

I hope to be visiting a number of bookshops, allotments, restaurants and gardens to launch the book - keep an eye here or on my Instagram for further details, or get in touch if you’d like to host anything! For review copies or any publicity enquiries please email amy.richardson@littlebrown.co.uk.

I plan today all wrong, first believing the forecast when it says it will be windy but dry, then getting to the allotment at the exact moment it begins to rain, deciding I will stick it out until I get too cold, leaving as the sun comes out again, messing around for long enough to miss the train I was planning on getting, then finally walking back to the railway station through a brief hailstorm to find that the later train is delayed by forty-five minutes due to something or other and so I wait unable to use my phone because I forgot to bring my charger with me; in the middle of this I give myself an enormous blister on my thumb because I can’t be bothered to put my gloves on to continue last week’s whittling project. All in all not a day well-spent but it is hard to see it is a waste of time exactly partly because I doubt I would have done anything more productive at home but mostly because it is a pleasure to spend time outside, even in a light rain, chipping away at a piece of hazel-wood, when - despite knowing that there is another cold snap to come - the signs of spring are everywhere, new shoots of nettle, new shoots of fennel, leaves of wild garlic coming up amongst the grass and the weeds at the base of the hazel tree, I think for a minute about picking them all and making one tiny sacred soup but instead I just cut a bunch of daffodils and walk off into the fickle weather.

in the kitchen

Pancake Day, of course, the end of Carnival or Carnevale or Mardi Gras or whatever you choose to call it, tonight a restaurant in town is doing (as it is also the Lunar New Year) endless crispy duck pancakes and so I won’t be cooking any pancakes myself; I have a vague idea to make Staffordshire oatcakes which are a sort of savoury oat flour pancake to have with bacon or cheese or both which I may or may not follow through on. Last year I made buckwheat galettes; one reason I never seem to make sweet pancakes (just sugar and lemon, thanks) for Pancake Day is because my enthusiasm for them is pale compared to my wife’s enthusiasm for frittelle, Venetian doughnuts made with a barely-sweet yeasted dough enriched with pinenuts and raisins and dusted hot from the oil with sugar which we make together for an event at the community gardens (she makes the dough, I fry it) and then she makes again the day after just for fun, fitting to gorge ourselves just once a year.

on the page

I order a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI of The Aenied because I want to read it again and I don’t know what I have done with my copy and the same day it arrives I buy a battered old Everyman edition of The Divine Comedy because it feels like I should probably read it and I had completely forgotten until I had both books in front of me that Virgil is of course a main character in The Divine Comedy and that Book VI specifically, a descent into the underworld, is an obvious and major influence on Dante’s work. I don’t have much to say about that except that it is nice when things line up, and when books come your way just at the time when it seems that you should be reading them.