14.10.25

in the soil

Two weeks away feels like forever, enough time certainly for summer to leave the soil completely; the only fruit left on the sprawling brambles are withered where they have not been eaten, the hazelnuts have all been eaten or else buried somewhere by the squirrels, and the little tree we planted in the hedgerow is bright red with crabapples. The raspberries I moved up the plot and away from the hungry blackberries reveal themselves to be autumn-fruiting, bent over now with rain-swollen berries. Soil needs turning over to tuck in cloves of garlic, scatter seeds of wintery mustards, but it is wet and heavy, the grass everywhere long and wet and bent, we need an Indian summer to get the autumn’s work done – for now I pull up the last turnips, pick sun-dried beans and the last of the cucumbers for seed, and cut finally and proudly the cucuzza, a couple of feet long, leaving behind still a mass of leaves and smaller fruit, and wonder if it will stay warm enough for any more to grow.

in the kitchen

Although after coming back from Greece I swore I would not eat another oregano-seasoned chip for months at least we have some spare sausagemeat at work that seems to want to be meatballs (breadcrumbs and ricotta to soften and flavour, garlic, chilli, cinnamon, oregano, lemon zest, braised in the oven in tomato sauce) and just enough potatoes to make a few chips to have with them for our staff lunch and it seems silly not to season them with oregano as well as salt. One of FOH is pescatarian and for her I make aubergine polpette out of the Slow Food Calabria book and wonder why I have never made them before, very easy to make and extremely delicious. The recipe feels weird because you start by dicing and boiling the aubergines to make a greying mush which will form the bulk of the polpette. Never let fools and children see things half-finished, somebody told me once.

on the page

My standard practice for holiday reading is to buy a couple of paperbacks at the airport WH Smith, read them on the journey there, and then never read the books I had actually selected and packed for the trip; this time I managed to read everything, finishing the last of my books (a re-read for the umpteenth time of My Family and Other Animals) on the plane home from Corfu. Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (translated recently into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) is maybe not exactly beach material but it was a strangely compelling holiday read with its unfolding and overlapping fragments of narrative, folk tale, animist reverie.