6.8.24
in the soil
The five-of-nine borlotti that withstood the slugs have shot up like teenagers, the questing-surely-conscious tips swaying beyond the height of their beanpoles, yet to fruit or even flower but healthy for all that and the roving brambles spreading too beyond their allotted bounds, sneaking hidden in the grass to try and take root around the currant bushes, strangle the chicory – this is what you get for cultivating weeds, I suppose. Trimming the grass around the fig tree I walk straight into a large nettle hiding among goldenrod and teasel in what I like to call my wildflower meadow to which I do exactly nothing throughout the year except pick a few daffodils, here and there, in season. There is little to show for all of this growth – a tub of blackberries aside – and I spend most of my time watering bare earth beneath which asparagus and wild garlic are setting deep roots.
in the kitchen
Everybody is talking not so much about the weather as about the temperature and if we can get past the temperature then about the humidity and as usual I think a lot about the temperature of what we eat, how – I have said this before – in places where it gets really hot there is a comfort in the tepid, the just-above-room-temperature whereas here we want our food to be either hot or cold, dishes describable as either, we baked it half an hour ago so it’s still kind of warm not an acceptable answer. Nonetheless I stuff some sardines and bake them before service and fry some peppers and let them rest and we put them on a plate together and people seem to like them, these few days when it gets really hot.
on the page
I am around halfway through Amber Husain’s Meat Love so I do not quite know what I think about it yet but so far I have no rebuttal to her neat skewering of the easy-answer-masked-as-wisdom she sees in the dominant gastronomic ideology of our time, the idea of the compassionate consumption of meat I have fully subscribed to since giving up vegetarianism; if nothing else it is refreshing to read a writer approach food with such serious intent.
In between reading this I look through the advance copy of my own Philosophy of Pickles and immediately find a dozen things I could have put better; still I am pleased with it and would be pleased if you pre-ordered a copy, which you can do here or wherever you usually buy books.