13.2.26

in the soil

It says on the the news that it has rained somewhere in Britain every day this year, so far, and I can well believe it; even a day like today that begins all sun and brisk breezes dissolves by the mid-afternoon into mizzling damp. I manage several hours at the allotment before it does, but despite the sun everything that I need to burn is still damp from the days and weeks before, and even when packed optimistically round with dry newspaper and kindling does little more than smoulder miserably. The rules of the allotment require me to wait on site until it has finished doing so and although I think there is little chance of the wet grass and the wet weeds and the wet earth catching fire I don’t have anything better to do on this sunny afternoon and so I take the opportunity to potter around, sawing up the old cardoon stalks, rather taller than me, which have been leaning up against the hedge since the autumn, piling them neatly up on what I am hoping will become a hugelkultur bed, checking on the blanching rhubarb one stalk of which at least is racing up in search of light, reapplying slug defences around the broad beans and finally, since I have my dad’s old pruning saw with me, wickedly sharp, sawing off a branch of hazel which is making a nuisance of itself in the middle of the tree with the intention of making a walking stick or staff. It is rather too long to begin with and, cutting a piece off the end, get sidetracked into carving that with my grafting knife, stripping off the bark and then cutting away the wood layer by layer in long strokes and shorter ones until the thing I have in my hand begins to resemble a butter knife. The sky is grey and clouded over when I realise I am surrounded by wood chips and the incinerator has stopped smoking entirely and I see why whittling is such a stereotypically popular way to pass the time, if you don’t have a book or a phone or much else to do.

in the kitchen

I meet up with a friend to eat a one-off meal cooked by roving chef Gareth Storey, Ed McIlroy of Tollington’s Fish Bar, and the Yellow Bittern’s Hugh Corcoran at Cadet, a wine bar in Newington Green I’ve been meaning to visit for ages. There’s all the things you might expect from these chefs, tripe stewed with butterbeans, a beautiful pig’s head terrine, pickled mussels and carrots and squares of pig’s ear all jumbled up together, a magnificent-looking fish stew/soup crowned with langoustines and bits of lobster (I think - we didn’t order one) and, most viscerally pleasurable, a plate of lamb shoulder and its juices sitting on a bed of matchstick potatoes and allioli so that with each forkful of lamb you can get a bite of creamy-gravy-soggy-chips with pockets of pure allioli here and there. The surprise hit though that I decide to recreate as soon as possible is a little plate of soft fudgy chickpeas bound in a mass of very-cooked spinach, very nurturing in flavour and texture. I got early to Newington Green so while I was waiting for our booking I went to the greengrocer to get some nice Italian lemons to make into marmalade as I haven’t for years, to Dan Lepard’s method, straightforward but with overnight soaks to break up the work and extract as much pectin from the fruit as possible, a very successful method every time I have tried it. While the lemon peel is cooking in its soaking water I make a pan of those chickpeas, a very confusing combination of smells to experience, as if the chickpeas were flavoured mainly with preserved lemon, or I was making garlicky-paprika-y marmalade.

I also made this pie, filled with spinach, feta and some slightly-off twarog, a nice shortcrust pastry , and topped with nigella and sesame seeds

on the page

Although like everyone else I dislike the term guilty pleasure there are certainly some books I read which I would not consider as artistically important or as creatively satisfying as others, being more or less formulaic or downright silly or whatever; I am particularly a sucker for historical fiction which makes a detective of some real-life or literary figure not usually known for their detective powers. Usually I pick these up in the charity bookshop, perhaps a book in the middle of a series, and read them and enjoy them and give them back to the charity bookshop and never think about them again. The other day I got a book called Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol which had everything you want from such books, ludicrous cameos, plenty of comedically staged that’s-where-he-got-that-idea-from moments, a reasonably nuanced but still broad caricature of the protagonist himself, complete with dialogue taken word-for-word from his writings or famously-quoted conversations; a fun evening’s read, in other words, and back it goes to the charity shop.