27.3.26
in the soil
It is sunny, yes, but when the wind blows it is cold, very cold; only yesterday coming back from town I walked into a hailstorm, the picture-frame I was carrying pushing me around like the sails of a windmill. Here the bucket which I had placed over those little stalks of accidentally-forced asparagus has blown off into my next-door neighbour’s plot - I have to retrieve it from among her raised beds, feeling like a trespasser - and one of my chairs has tumbled into the netting protecting my broad beans from rodents. Thankfully nothing is crushed but still I take this as my cue to remove the netting which soon the bean plants will be pushing against, they are long past the stage where a passing mouse might nip straight through their stalk or make off entirely with the seed-bean itself and I do not want to come back in a week and find that the netting was fine enough for aphids to enter but too fine for ladybirds to get in and eat them. The plants are coming into white-and-purple flower and I find myself thinking how good my crop will be, superstitiously forcing the thought from my mind. Other than picking another bagful of nettles there is not much to attend to; there is a big pile of ash on a nearby plot left from a communal weekend session of burning the accumulated prunings of winter, and I scoop some up and sprinkle a little on my compost, a little round the fig tree and around my fruit bushes, and put some in a bottle with some rainwater, for what purpose exactly I’m not sure.
in the kitchen
Now that the weather has been getting warmer I suddenly remember all of the cold-weather cooking I haven’t got around to doing over the winter; the cold winds and smatterings of rain and hail give me an excuse to indulge. Toad-in-the-hole, one day, my second attempt to convince my Italian wife of the validity of this dish (my first attempt, years ago, a sad and lumpen thing of dense and unrisen batter). This one puffs up well but our slightly malfunctioning hob and a moment of inattention on my part burn the gravy I have spent an hour on (slowly slowly caramelising onions, mainly) and so I cannot call it an unqualified success. Rather better is a lasagna made the next day, meatless but with wild garlic pesto and bechamel and twaróg1 cheese in between several layers of pasta, somehow fresh and quite light for a big dish of baked pasta, with lemon-dressed rocket on the side.
on the page
Having a studio to write and mess around with photography in means that I have another space to leave books in and so I now have on the go at any one time
a sofa book (could be anything)
a bedside book (non-fiction)
a backpack book (for reading on the train)
a studio book (research or work related)
and I therefore feel like I am reading very slowly, a chapter here and a chapter there; my bedside book, for example, David Graeber’s Debt, I think I have been reading for over a year. My most recently finished sofa book is Patrick Harpur’s The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, a very readable and occasionally infuriating attempt to recenter the creative imagination within Western thought; the kind of book which (even if you don’t entirely agree with it) sparks resonances everywhere, making you look in a different way at everything else you are reading or watching or that you encounter.
After spending time at the Anna Tasca Lanza school in Sicily I became very fussy about ricotta; most of the stuff you can buy in the UK is far too wet and creamy for cooking with. The bog-standard twaróg you can get in any polski sklep or in the international section of Morrisons is better for baking with or for making gnocchi or pasta fillings than all but the very best ricotta.