4.2.25

in the soil

The dense fog which covers the beach and the sea burns off as the train heads inland and by the time I get to the allotment it is sunny, actually warm and sunny and I take off my fleece and my hat and hang them on one of the chestnut poles of the fruit cage; by the time two barrowloads of woodchip have been dumped around the fennel to keep the grass from growing up around it I am sweating and I take a break to kneel in the still cold earth before digging over one bed, two, full of the unexpected sunshine and full of plans for the year – I will grow agretti there in two little beds, plant seed potatoes there in the next few weeks, soon up will come the asparagus and then it will be time for tomato and cucumber seedlings indoors and the artichokes will be in full flow and maybe every day will be like this, full of sun and promise – for now I still have to weed around the rhubarb, still not quite settled in its current bed, and I lean heavily while doing so on young nettles hidden in the grass, and cool my stinging knuckles in the still cold earth.

in the kitchen

After another busy week with friends visiting and a chef away and my wife cooking a Carnevale feast of antipasti and cicchetti at work there is not a great deal of staple food in the house – no eggs, bread, pasta cheese – but we do not feel we can do another weekend of takeaways so having spent the day outdoors I cook a slightly hectic meal of the kind I do not usually cook, some beetroot from the veg bag (a vegetable I do not particularly like) are roasted with vinegar and spices and a final glaze of tahini and slightly pickled cedro, I make a barley pilaf with two leeks dug up from my mother's plot, with the ends of two bags of flour and some grainy yoghurt I make flatbreads and there is salad from the veg bag too, yoghurt sauce, some pickled chillies with very tough skins I am slowly eating my way through, I stuff myself on plants.

on the page

In Andrew Barton's Free Food he talks about the difference between the European-peasant-adjacent food he cooks for popups and supper clubs which is very simple and precise, pure if you think that is the kind of word which should be applied to food, made from a deliberately limited palette of produce, and the "hippie" food he grew up eating and cooking in which techniques and ingredients from everywhere in the world, from roadside stalls and farmers' markets and Asian supermarkets, grandma and factory-made are mashed together under the unifying principles of tamari, tahini and melted cheese, and although I grew up in a different place with a different set of go-to ingredients and if I cannot quite shake the purism of a certain kind of cooking I am finding again a little more freedom in throwing together meals like the above without worrying about how they might look on a menu or on Instagram.