24.9.23

in the soil

Between work and the hospital and the funeral there was not the time to prune the raspberry canes at the time the raspberry canes want to be pruned, I did so at least a week late, green shoots already coming. In response they have been sulking all year and barely keep their heads above the weeds their dense growth should be keeping down but which instead bind them root and stem and so I am surprised to find them now fruiting more than they have all year, enjoying the squalls of rain and the late heat, the heavy golden air.

in the kitchen

A whim excused as necessity (we need a snack for the menu) drives me to make a fresh little cheese, not an acidulated fake “ricotta” or curd cheese but a plump round tuma that comes out in neat slices. I think often of the things I might do if I didn’t cook in restaurant kitchens like keep bees or make cider or sausages or hams or (of course) look after or make cheeses although the truth is I would probably get bored. Perhaps I might refocus my patience as I have had to first with pickles and then with plants and so allow myself to love time after time the setting of milk into delicate jelly, the cutting of the junket into heavy curds, the steady extraction of moisture and then the salting, the turning and the aging, or perhaps I will just continue, once in a while, to make a little plump cheese on a whim.

on the page

I am in a good season of reading, swift and voracious, in which A.K. Blakemore’s new The Glutton stands out, in it especially

Everyone needs salt … Life is miserable without salt. It’s miserable with salt – but maybe more bearably so.

which is the kind of thing my younger self might have copied out and stuck on a wall somewhere, or left stuck in my head, echoing some deeper meaning never entirely understood.