16.9.25
in the soil
Too ill to go in this week I rely on intelligence from my mother who sends me a few pictures of the cucuzze still hanging in place from the mess of bamboo canes, elder branches and their own vines which supports them; I cannot tell from these whether or how much they have grown since last week, I am just hoping they get to a sensible size – not as big as they would get in Sicily, but big enough to bother with – before the first frost which despite the honeyed September sun could come at any moment. Another picture shows the meagre harvest from my one pot-bound tomato plant, all picked in various stages of ripeness before the dreaded blight can strike the allotment, growing tomatoes here is always a battle between the sun and the blight. The fungus which causes the disease – blackened stems, bruised and browning fruit, a general look of inexorable decay – lives always in the soil, in the air, in the waste from commercial potato farming, waiting only for weather wet enough to thrive, an inevitability in this country.
in the kitchen
When I got into work last Wednesday I drained the separate bowls of soaking chickpeas and haricot beans and put each into their own pan, took a bag of podded borlotti out of the freezer and put them in another and filled each pan with water, a bit of garlic, a splash of olive oil, salt. Then I chopped up several onions and carrots and celery sticks, distributing carrot and celery ends between the pans of pulses, and sweated the resulting soffritto in olive oil in the biggest pan we have, while into another smaller pan went chopped fennel, celery, parsley stalks, red chilli and garlic to sweat in more olive oil; now with five steaming pans next to me I could get on with my day. These are the weeks when the rhythm of the kitchen changes from last-minute assemblies of fresh this and pickled that to slowly constructed dishes, soups, stews and ragus, and this year especially I feel I am ready for them. Bring on rabbit and mushroom and brown braises!
on the page
This week although I broke out of my reading rut and raced through The Great When as well as the devastatingly sad Last Train From Liguria I have spent most of my reading time perusing the pamphlet Back To Basics: A Guide To Ecological Photo Chemistry from The Sustainable Darkroom, an extremely interesting and straightforward walk through developing film using a mixture of herbal extracts and common household chemicals. Now I am trying to curb my impatience until the sodium carbonate I ordered turns up (tomorrow) to join the citric acid and bicarbonate, and I suppose I will have to exercise much greater patience to make the long-fermented herbal tinctures the book describes. One of the impacts of modernity is to shorten waiting times, it notes, a lesson for us all (especially me).