1.4.25

in the soil

Brassicas take a lot of space and a lot of time to grow their way into edibility and as the most common types are widely and cheaply available I have not really bothered growing them before, a few unsuccessful attempts at cime di rapa and mustard greens aside, but at the end of last summer when I had space where the cucumbers were and there were a few seedlings going I thought why not, and while the resulting crop are smaller than any I could buy and smaller by far than the ones you see in the markets of Palermo, a reminder as ever that here on this island we approach the edges of agriculture where very little really wants to grow, despite this it is very pleasing to cut a white and bloated flower from the top of its stalk and see it dense and compact. A chain restaurant in town has a Mother's Day sign outside saying she can't eat flowers but she can, of course, cauliflower and broccoli and artichoke, nasturtium and calendula, the first white stars appearing on the wild garlic in the shade of the hazel tree.

in the kitchen

In a week when I have been very busy doing this and that and launching a little book and outside of work the only intentional cooking I have been doing is for recipe testing I have eaten several takeaways. Last night while testing the recipe (which would require several hours in the oven and which I am eating for lunch today) I chopped up all the vegetables I could find:

two tiny leeks and one small one

a sad potato which needed several parts cutting away

a tiny cauliflower which had not achieved the state mentioned above but rather begun to bolt and open

and put them to cook in olive oil with a few stoned kalamata olives. When they were all soft and starting to catch I added tinned tomato and cooked everything into a mush and then scrambled an egg into it and ate it all on toast. While this tasted good and nourished me it is not a meal I will ever cook again, or recommend that anyone else cook.

on the page

Mark Bowles' All My Precious Madness is lent to me by a friend who works in the bookshop, I think you'll like this, which is often a worrying thing to be told; to receive absolute crap with an I think you'll like this is to realise how little the giver thinks of you or even knows you, a potentially friendship-ending act of generosity. Luckily All My Precious Madness is excellent, more than living up to its cover-quote claim of an English Bernhard, sharing with the German author the genre of novel-as-rant, a glorious and detailed rant. For unrelated reasons I also read an interview with WG Sebald in which the interviewer asks him about Thomas Bernhard and the almost fanatical extremism of the qualifying words both authors use, the way in which these long and very precise sentences, where every part of speech has its particular qualifier, while seemingly reinforcing verisimilitude, actually tend towards a sustained and almost hysterical hyperbole, which Mark Bowles shares too.