11.9.23

in the soil

All week in the kitchen I have been gently steaming but the moisture in the hot air has not found its way into the ground; earth I turned over not two weeks back, its seedlings bird-robbed, is baked to clay. I try and fail to scratch up a handful of dust. Still in the darker corners of the little plot water persists, beneath the grass that has overgrown around the tangled vines of cucumber the soil is dark and rich and crumbles in the hand. One fruit I cut clumsily, I break the stem and water beads out across the broken surface like blood from a razor wound.

in the kitchen

Our staff lunch consists normally of pasta which I could happily eat every day, given enough variation – our rice cooker saves us from monotony. When it is this hot it is too hot for hot pasta and we have a pasta salad, a little different every time. In fact I think a pasta salad should be a little different every bite. This is easy to achieve in a restaurant kitchen where you have lots of bits and pieces ready to go, or at home if you have a great love of condiments and pickles. In Italy you can buy jars of pickled vegetables specifically to make pasta or rice salad with, neatly cubed.

I don’t want food that is cold to also be cloying so I don’t use mayonnaise, and I think generally you want pasta in short solid shapes rather than tubes; conchiglie, fusilli, casarecce are good. Here some things I have put in pasta salads –

tuna with its oil, salami in cubes, chopped boiled egg, cheese in cubes, ham in cubes, olives, mixed pickled vegetables chopped up, capers, cornichons chopped up, sliced pickled onions, pesto (Genovese, Trapanese), herbs (parsley, basil, mint) cured, grilled and marinated mackerel, roasted peppers

– although there are hundreds of other things I might put in pasta salads, in other kitchens.

on the page

From the crossword I learn APRICITY (the warmth of the sun in winter) and I do not get as I sometimes do the urge to use this new-to-me word in some piece of writing or another but instead a desire for the thing itself, about as far from the current weather as could be imagined. It is normal to wilt through the end of the summer and wish it were winter, I think, but stranger to wish within that longing for the touch of warmth that tells you summer will come again, a tired welcome warmth on cold-red skin.