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A therapeutic clear out

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I am back in Oxfam (temporarily) and it is lovely – filling an Oxfam-shaped hole in my life – and below are some of the reasons why.

Now, I am a probably a bit over-excited so the list will be a long read, actually several long reads, so might put off all but the most hardened readers. 

(And there are no interesting photos but there will be in the next post, promise.)

Please don’t worry if you are not that hardened, I will never know that you went off to take up knitting.

So, the shop was looking rather thin, tired and sad.

Upstairs, there were crates of unlooked-at old books because no one had checked their value and put them out or online, the shelves were stuffed but chaotic, there was stuff /rubbish everywhere – stashed down the side of lockers, on the high shelves, under  stacks of chairs, under sorting benches, on the high tops of shelves, down the sides of cupboards, and and …..

We had alway known that, but with the agreement of the amazing new area manager, more of her in later instalments, we could clear out – and I mean really clear out.

Meanwhile donations had been turned away because those that were there, were not being sorted and shelved – and you can’t do that because who knows what value that turned away donation would have had.

And the takings were down to about £700 to £850 with weeks when only £600-something was the order of the day.

Now, of course, there were the pandemic and lockdowns to consider – and with the new ‘freedoms’ (don’t get me started on the handling of all this) bookshop life is easier – but even so….

This is only the pre-amble so again, you might want to heave a sigh and turn away. But if you stick with me there is a the (temporary) happy ending.

The shop is now looking fat, sleek and refreshed and last week we took more than £1200.

I will come back to that fattening later, but for now, upstairs – the behind-the-scenes work.

The shop manager is a hoarder and while the cat is away us mice have been having a therapeutic clear out.

We found whilst clearing/cleaning out for example ( not an exhaustive list by any means) :

Four irons and two ironing boards – we are a bookshop. 

We do indeed sell clothes online but our amazing online-clothes person takes them home to wash and iron, and even if she didn’t, we wouldn’t need four irons and two ironing boards. Even clothes shops have steamers, not irons, so goodness knows how long they have been stuffed down the side of those lockers.

Size cubes dating from 2004 – we know that because 2004 was the year of the Boxing Day Tsunami and that was the year we turned into a bookshop. 

Size cubes in case you are wondering, are those little bits of plastic that are on coat hangers to tell you that something is size 10 (I wish I was looking at those), 12, 14, 16 or XL or whatever. They are now on their way to an Oxfam clothes shop.

Three till drawers for tills that no longer exist in Oxfam, they are in the re-cycling bin.

Left-over red nose stuff from 2017 – apparently you need to take those back to Sainsbury’s and are in my car boot ready to do just that.

A broken hoover – we have two working others.

It has gone to the local tip thanks to a volunteer 

And another volunteer is taking one of the ironing boards – the one with no cover and just, just in case we need an ironing board in a bookshop, we kept one.

She has also taken a box of old postcards to be valued by a local auction house.

That box was on a shelf she decided to have a look at. 

They had been there as long as she could remember. They had been ignored for say, oh I don’t know, several years. Certainly all the eight years I had been working there and thought it was a box of official Oxfam paperwork – after all it was on that shelf.

Two large and heavy boxes of foreign coins – we can send them to be re-used in some way but have yet to find out where and how – but I should point out, we are volunteers holding the fort and this is not top of our list. Anyone who has any ideas, please let me know.

Five boxes of mobile phones – now we know there was an Oxfam contract to re-cycle these and I learned that all the gold medals at this year’s Olympics we made from gold from old mobile phones.

And they had been sitting there for say, let’s say accumulating, for several years. 

At the moment, there is a hiatus I understand, between contracts, so they are sorted, boxed up, properly stored and ready to go when we know where they need to go.

There is a stack of chairs for shop meetings that never happen –  we don’t have shop meetings because they ‘are a waste of time’ so when on a whim, I decided to pull them out and hoover – we still have two – I discovered another box full of old postcards in amongst the deep, deep dust and rather surprisingly, another box of light bulbs – we have about 40 of them found in nooks and corners and now in one place.

They, the postcards not the light bulbs, will be part of a lovely display on the newly installed display table.

So, that is enough for now but stayed tuned for how we mice have in the words of our new area manager – and there will be more about her – have started ‘breathing and making the shop sing.’

Eating Out

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Whist we could not make it to Northern Majorca this month ( again – and yes I know this is a rich person’s whinge), we have made it lovely West Wales.

Well, it is lovely but it is also cold with a very brisk northerly ‘breeze’ as the weatherman called it, and not much in the way of sun.

Still and all, it is somewhere other than home, and it came with a promise.

I had promised myself and the Best Beloved had also promised, that we would eat out – no cooking for me and the chance to have our first meals out since before Christmas.

So, not being a great researcher, I had pottered around on the internet looking for good places to eat on the locality, and thought I would leave the fine tuning of my potential choices until we got to our rented cottage and read the inevitable visitors’ book – that which always tells you where to go and where to avoid.

Ah well, the visitors book was scrapped as a Covid measure.

And the wifi connection in this part of very rural West Wales is pretty rubbish. After half an hour of one/off connection, I discovered that St Davids is not a place of culinary excellence. 

There are a couple of highlights but the BB balked at the innovative Grub Kitchen where you eat the insects bred by the chef’s wife in her ‘grub’ farm – he was not further enamoured by the news you can also visit it and see what you are about to eat before it is mashed, fried, griddled etc. 

I would have gone for it as I remember fondly the salty crunchiness of deep fried crickets in Thailand many moons ago.

He said he would go with me but be very, very careful about what he chose off the menu. And would probably stick to a beer.

The one posh place in St David’s doesn’t allow dogs and the cottage owners don’t allow you to leave them alone in the place, so that was out.

Anyway, I had found Mrs Will The Fish which is apparently an unassuming bungalow in Solva where you can pre-order and collect a platter of locally caught fish and shellfish, so that is hopefully happening tomorrow.

But today we decided to have a late lunch in one of the local pubs which I gathered after half an hour of waiting for reviews to come up on my weary, wifi-deprived laptop, did good food and was popular.

We booked for 2pm, went in and were seated and they were happy to have the dog along, so all looked good.

I went for the mussels – but the mussels were off.

Then what I really wanted was one of those orders that Americans do.

‘Please can I have a small size greek salad, not a main size, alongside a starter possibly the duck or maybe the potted pork what do you recommend? Both at the same time you understand, and a small side order of chips?’

The BB said he was having a burger. I watched the service and the harassed and no doubt short-staffed comings and goings and decided I too would have a burger but without the bread.

Not too complicated/American a request but it threw the waitress – her revenge would come later.

Meanwhile and I have to say, it had been a long meanwhile so far, a couple sat down next to us.

They had walked 6 miles of the Coastal Path and were looking forward to a justified late lunch.

‘Food service has been suspended,’ they were told by the waitress.

‘Until when?’ they asked.

‘What time is it?’

‘2.30’

‘Oh, then we have stopped serving.’

They had to settle for crisps and peanuts and by that time, I was beginning to envy them. 

They finished their snacks, and a couple of lagers and set out to find a bus back before our waitress appeared again.

‘Sorry she said, you burgers got dropped so there will be a delay so they can cook them again.’

Yes it was the same waitress who was less than impressed by the idea of a burger without bread, ‘You mean all the stuff but not in a burger. No bun??’

I was, at that point very glad, I had not asked for anything more complicated.

Any by ‘got dropped’ she later admitted she had dropped them……

They were good homemade burgers, and indeed grit free, and the chips were excellent – mine arrived in a bun as it is clearly beyond comprehension that a burger doesn’t belong in a bun. And I get that up to a point – a scotch egg without the egg… but anyway.

And though the more than generous helpings it meant there was no need for supper, I was somewhat at a loss about what to do come early evening and got rather nostalgic about the night before when I had rustled up crushed Pembrokeshire new potatoes with mint butter, asparagus and some thick cut local ham with background Radio 4.

This eating out business might be a bit over-rated.

So, I think I am planning to save my BB’s promise tokens for eating out – much like the old green shield stamps – until I can book a place which will serve food I really enjoy and could/would never cook at home.

And, tomorrow there is Mrs Will The Fish eaten at ‘home.’ Fish fingers crossed.

Maxine Peake and Pies

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This, dear reader, is a rambling story which takes in a Mike Leigh film, pie-making, a waste of a day, a trip to a flea market, and it ends in disaster.

So if none of that takes your fancy, feel free to leave now.

So, one rainy day in the winter lockdown, we decided to watch Mike Leigh’s film, Peterloo. 

Maxine Peake was the indomitable mother figure and she made pies for a living.

Cut to the Kempton Antiques Market – really a large flea market.

I used to go there with a good friend and one day I bought an artisan wooden mallet type thing which I thought was probably used by a someone chipping marble or wood and which I thought would be useful to bash against my hammer to get out tacks when I was dismantling a chair ready for re-upholstering.

(Actually, it was rubbish at that, but I liked it anyway.)

Cut back to Peterloo and the family is sitting around talking politics or something because I have to say during that shot, I had stopped listening.

I saw my artisan piece of equipment behind Maxine Peake.

Putting two and two together, I realised my artisan equipment had something to do with pies and went on a search to find out what it was.

I even tracked down the name of the set director who is the imaginatively named Charlotte Dirickx. I thought I would contact her and find out about this obscure 19th century cooking implement.

I didn’t need to.

I was telling the story so far to a dog-walking friend when she said, ‘Oh it’s a pie dolly for making hot water crust pies.’

Indeed, it seemed, it was.

Now, I know that Mike Leigh has this thing about authenticity so I thought, well if Maxine Peake can make a pie with one, I can too.

Now, I like a pie and often make a pie with my grandmother-taught shortcrust pastry skills. Indeed we had a cheese, onion and dill one last night.

And here as they say are two I had made earlier though I have to say, I didn’t make my own puff pastry – life is indeed too short.

But I hadn’t done hot water crust for a while so it was a bit of a challenge during what was a driech and drear, lethargy-inducing lockdown day.

I am sure Maxine’s character didn’t make her pies with best butcher’s meat – and indeed a Manchester pie is basically potatoes and a bit of butter in a pie.

But I did. 

So I made the beef filling – as I said good quality beef, bay leaves, red wine, carrots, celery, nice stock – but not too much because it had to support the pastry. 

And I made the hot water pastry and moulded it around my pie dolly, filled the insides, put a lid on it and put it in the oven.

I can freely admit at this point that it was a faff and the pie dolly is not going to become a favourite kitchen implement.

And you can see why.

A good few hours of wasted effort on a failed experiment.

The Best Beloved said he was fine with eating a collapsed pie and the pastry was lovely, but the filling was a bit dry. I mean, really?

Crypto – but not a currency

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Years, actually many years ago, I worked in the water ‘industry’ –  how can water, essential to life, be an industry? But that is for another rant.

Anyway, as a result, I have been warning anyone who would listen, that any bright terrorist/mad person could cause a lot of damage easily by ‘polluting’ a drinking water supply.

I have to say that ‘anyone’ in this case is currently only the Best Beloved, but in times past, it has been people in the House of Commons bar, on a Leeds bus, a group of 100 PhDs, two chief executives of Yorkshire Water, an Offwat executive, and people around for supper.

Well, I feel vindicated as an attempt to hack into a Florida water supply was stopped only by an eagle-eyed water company employee.

Right, dear reader, you are welcome to think at this point that I have made my point and you can get on with your life. 

What is more this might not be the time you want to hear more about ‘surprise’ diseases caused by something which started in an animal and causes all sorts of issues for humans.

Feel free to escape to your knitting.

This is not a story of water-terrrosim but it is about a water-borne issue.

So, I was at one stage in life ( quite a well paid stage, I have to say,) a consultant for Yorkshire Water – and there was a drought.

I, along with my smart friend and lunch companion, asked the CEO what would happen if it didn’t rain. ‘It will,’ he said. It didn’t.

After he lost his job, the new CEO, asked me about this conversation and I said they should do a little bit of planning for the worst and hoping for the best. Cryptospordium, for example.

I bet you are sitting up now, a little bit excited to know about Cryptosporidium. Well, breathless reader, I will tell you.

It is a microscopic parasite and it causes diarrhoea and, wouldn’t you know it, a persistent cough.

It gets into the water system from animal faeces – now you need to think of sheep grazing near Yorkshire reservoirs.

So, for most people it is unpleasant, but for some, it can be a killer.

And, significantly, it does not get killed by usual water treatment.

So, I set up a two day crisis planning event for the management of Yorkshire Water.

They sat, a little reluctantly I may say, around a table and we fed them information we had created.

We told them, it is 6pm, and you have just had an alert that crypto has been found in the water system.

What you have to do with crypto is tell everyone to boil their water.

For that to happen you have to alert them – put something out on the 10.30 regional news for example.

But, watching that will be the chief executives of all the regional breweries who use a lot of unboiled water, hairdressers, hospital managers, people who run pub kitchens, well you can imagine the list.

They will want to know what is going on.

And what about all the people who hadn’t watched the late news and didn’t know they should boil their water before they took a glass of it to bed.

There will be a lot of people who did watch the news and will call the Yorkshire Water helpline – but everyone there has gone home. And anyway they are used to dealing with bill queries and leaks – what information will you need to get together so they can answer the questions they will be getting?

Because of the drought, YW had re-engineered the water system to get supplies all over the place but no one now has a map of where water goes.

And, you tell the rather shifty looking management team, they only test for crypto once every three days – so you could have a bit of a lag on your hands but no one knows for sure.

As they set about making decisions, we brought in their own section chiefs to explain why this or that could or couldn’t happen – and they had to work through changing scenarios.

I could tell you a lot more details but I suspect your interest might just wane a bit.

As a result of that exercise YW re-vamped all sorts of plans and procedures over the next two weeks, and a couple of weeks later than that, crypto was found on another water company’s patch. 

YW’s chief executive rang them and told them he was sending a team to help with the newly minted plans. It worked.

It wasn’t a worldwide pandemic threat but did serve to remind that those people who will have to deal with crises, should be forced to sit through a proper planning exercise. Just saying, Boris.

Squid and Friends

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Apparently, hearing is the last sense to leave the body. Well, for me the last activity to leave the Covid lethargy, is cooking.

No surprise there then for anyone who knows me.

Meanwhile, it takes days to actually get round to cleaning the kitchen floor, I have been dithering and dathering about which Coursera course to sign up for – even though they are free and only require a minimum of concentration…..

All those things I did in April, have not been done since. 

I have no pictures of my culinary disaster so here are a few winter pictures.

So this, dear reader, if you are still with me and not off to do something more interesting, is a story of squid and friends.

Squid is cheap, and is best if you cook for a few seconds or a really long time, or both. ( I am sure there are other such ingredients but none spring to mind – mind you, not much ‘springs’ to mind these days.)

The Best Beloved was not a squid fan when he met me – mind you he was not a Labour voter, good at buying jewellery, hoovering, putting the washing on, enjoying long lunches with friends.

I converted him to squid stew with various adaptations of a Hugh Fearnley-Wittingtstall recipe.

You make a tomato sauce – a good one – fry the squid for seconds and put in the sauce and then both of them on a long slow cook. (Bottom of the Aga for those of us who live in Deepest Sussex).

You can add potatoes and fennel an hour or so in. 

I have made this, with variations, loads of times and so it counts as easy, familiar, comfort, not meat, cheap, flexible, appreciated – and most importantly to this story, whilst you are doing something else.

So, all was in hand when I realised I was approaching the time for a family call and went into the oven to check the stew.

Well the squid was nicely meltingly ready, but the fennel (always a tricky ingredient) was a bit hard.

(Dear reader, I know this is going on rather long, but there will be a nicely uplifting bit about friends soon-ish.)

So, I decided to take out the squid and put the rest back in the oven, though this time in the top (hot) oven of the Aga and get on with the call.

Call took longer than I thought and so it was the charred remains of a tomato sauce I pulled  out of the oven. Inedible, no I mean it, not possible to rescue.

I had squid, and a memory.

My lovely sis had returned from living in Milan.

She had spent time with staying with my ex-boyfriend, and various other people and then pitched up in Leeds to stay with me for a week. 

(She is still in Yorkshire – some many years later.)

If you are lucky, there are times in your life when you have a special group of friends. You spend time together, you do things together, you get along brilliantly –  you are caught up in a delightful web of friendship.

It has happened to me three times in my life, and I celebrate each of them.

This time was in Leeds and my sis was a pivotal part of it.

And, among many other things she brought us group of friends, a recipe.

Squid and peas and pasta.

In my memory it was summer and there were back doors open, our friends drinking wine and gossiping around the kitchen table whilst my sis cooked her meal.

So, here in winter, and lockdown, I looked at my cooked squid. Got some peas. Melted some butter and cooked the peas in it. Swirled them with the squid and the clinging bits of non-ruined tomato sauce and added them to some cooked spaghetti – using, of course, a splash of the spaghetti cooking liquid to meld the sauce.

I have to say at this point, this was not my sis’s way of making the dish but hey ho, I did what I could under the circumstances.

My BB duly appreciated supper – but I was back in a house in Leeds with my amazing friends, laughing, letting dogs run round the garden, swapping journalistic stuff, discussing politics, hearing stories of life in Millan, music on in the background.

There were BBQs, there were loves lost and gained, there was a sunny summer, and that was that very special time.

And no we are not all still in contact, but at the time I was pretty convinced I was living a very good life – and indeed, dear reader, I was.

The Art Of Conversation

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When we were allowed, and it was my Best Beloved’s birthday, six of us had lunch together.

So, good friends invited us and erected (without, so they say, any martial discord) a sturdy  gazebo so we could all sit outside, be safe.

And just talk.

Chat, cut across one another with an anecdote, digress, suggest a good book read, rail at politicians, tease, compliment on the lovely food, tell stories, just relax with people we know very well, and laugh, all of it for hours – no ‘lunch party’ just good friends.

It was such a highlight – and was rather giddily exhausting.

It has been a long time since we did that. 

In our house in this nearly a year of more or less lockdown, there are no-need-to-finish sentences, chats about the dog’s welfare (always a topic of conversation), who is doing the washing, discussion about what to watch on tv with the inevitable ‘wasn’t he in that thing we watched, you know the one set in Northumbria with that woman who was in ……..,’ endless half conversations about how awful the government are, and more about Trump.

And, which small projects have to be done today – or tomorrow, or the next day.

(Today, for me it was pickling red cabbage and doing the ironing. For the BB it is a gentle start to podcasting his book, a very gentle start I have to say, and reading the beginning of a friend’s book.)

And it is not just us. I was talking to a neighbour on my dog walk this morning and she said she was getting to the point of not wanting to ring friends because she had nothing much to say – minding children, cleaning the kitchen floor, dog walking….

And another acquaintance who said it was so nice to chat to someone she didn’t know that well because it meant she made a ‘chatty effort.’

We have a Zoom call tonight – and yes they have fallen by the wayside from the early days when we would have several a week – and it means I will spend some time in the next couple of hours thinking of something, anything, interesting I can say.

(Leave alone the fact my hair is a mess after walking in rain and wind and whether I will try and make it look presentable, or just not bother.)

( And likewise with the ironing – do I really need to bother? I ironed a white linen shirt bought on our September trip to Italy – I think I might have mentioned that before – worn last I can’t remember when or why, or when or why I might wear it again….)

I wear either dog walking boots, or slippers. And it is jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper. I would say 80 per cent of my wardrobe is hanging there doing nothing. ( I have this fantasy that they get up in the wee small hours and make all kinds of interesting outfit combinations and sneak out for Covid-free meet ups with other people’s unused wardrobes.)

My dog walking friend called me today ( we haven’t met up since lockdown) and I suggested we talked and walked. We will each go on our own dog walk and we will talk on the phone as we do it.

(We will also arrange to swap her marmalade for my pickled red cabbage when I make one of my occasional trips to the ‘delights’ of Petersfield.)

So, please, dear reader, don’t tell me that you are discussing Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with your re-ingnited group of university friends one of whom is now an interesting tech millionaire.

Or, you have set up a local poetry discussion group and you are exploring Blake’s oeuvre.

Or, you have surprised yourself by getting involved in an Instagram group advising on the best make-up for an older woman to make herself ‘feel good by looking good’.

Or, you find yourself soothed by chatting daily to your sourdough starter,

Please don’t.

Mind you Wittgenstein’s black swans stuff was always a good conversation starter at a party – my political philosophy degree must come in useful for something.

A Dilly Lockdown

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I am finding this lockdown a bit driech (splendid Scottish word for dull and gloomy ) and not least because there seemed to be a surprising number of people who apparently had essential journeys to undertake this week, and many of them seemed to be urgent given the speed at which they were driving.

So, life here in this house in Deepest Sussex has ground to a slow movement. A bedaggled (soiled by being dragged along wet ground) dog walk is essential, and so, it now appears, is an afternoon film.

We are not great cinema goers but now with the help of (thank god) technology we can bring the films into our sitting room on a daily basis.

And we have watched some very good films – so no game show trash for us – which means I can pretend that I have some virtue. (decency, merit, as well as piousness and snobbery.)

And, self-justification (I don’t think I need bother you with other words for that.)

I cook, the Best Beloved puts some jigsaw pieces in now and then, and writes history or commentaries current politics, whilst I sometime clean ( well, actually nip round with the vac, as my grandmother would say.)

Our days are anfractuous (winding or circuitous, in case you needed to know.)

Now and then a ‘spur’ hits and I am slowly (sluggishly, driftingly, dawdlingly, lazily, ineptly) re-decorating the downstairs loo. 

And as we speak the BB is out in the garage trying to sort out the winding mechanism to insert the leaf into an old oak table so we can sell it – don’t ask. (astrabilious, tetchy, irritated, acriasial….)

But, I am told that this is a time to be kind to yourself and so I am doing that on a daily basis. (tender, dilly – who’d have thought? but that is a word I can feel myself using again, good-hearted – nicely Buddhist, benign, self-generous – really?I would be out hugging trees with crystals, and that ain’t going to happen.) 

But really and truly that just means letting myself off from painting/cleaning the wood floors/sorting out the dog insurance/clearing out the pantry/re-upholstering four chairs/leave alone the learning of a new language, or an instrument, or skill, or indeed anything very much.

So, I am negligent (guilty, culpable, blameworthy, hangdog, reprehensible,) and also lazy (slothful, work-shy, languorous, distracted, listless.)

But I am going to be dilly (newly attractive word) to myself and know that there is a tagine in the oven, a well-walked dog, a fire to be lit, a good book waiting for bedtime, a film to be watched, no one I know has died of Covid, and tomorrow I will be more (assiduous, over diligent, hardworking, conscientious, dynamic, active, energised.)

I suspect this plan might be bambosh (deceptive nonsense), or blague ( pretentious nonsense).

But as we say in this house, tomorrow is another day, and maybe the BB will grace me with a basemain ( kiss on the hand) and we will wander, stroll, saunter, amble, dawdle, potter, ramble, meander, drift, digress through it.

And we will appreciate our luck and life, and that might well be enough.

And, as a PS and the principle that there is no new emotion under the sun, here is A E Houseman who my BB was reading as I wrote this post:

Yonder see the morning blink:

The sun is up, and up must I,

To wash and dress and eat and drink

And look at things and talk and think

And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed

And what’s to show for all my pain?

Let me lie abed and rest:

Ten thousand times I’ve done my best

And all’s to do again.

Hommage to Heinz Tomato Soup

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Along with my battle between ‘why bother’ and ‘keeping up standards’, I am veering between comfort food and being clean and healthy.

Right this minute though, I am thinking of childhood comfort food.

Frey Bentos pies. I am not sure I would give one house room now, but then the idea you could use a can opener to take the lid off a raw pie and then cook and eat it within say half an hour seemed pretty impressive.

I think I might have mentioned before that butterscotch Angel Delight was a favourite and indeed was a favourite, I found out later in life, with Ethiopian refugees. ( By then it needed searching out and I am pretty sure you couldn’t find it in Waitrose Petersfield but an Ethiopian diaspora in London made it possible to locate – maybe still is for all I know.)

I don’t eat either of those any more but there is one comfort food which has stayed.

Heinz tomato soup.

That, with Dairylea sandwiches was what I ate when recovering from anything from measles to a bad cold.

And there is a tin always in my cupboard.

I was delighted to find that also some proper cook had it as her comfort food in an article at the back of some foodie magazine which I seem to have thrown out or I would credit her.

So, imagine my gasp of horror when the Best Beloved found, unusually I have to say, he was out of homemade soup took it and drank/ate it….

I had it to recover from pneumonia a couple of years ago, and I am very much hoping I won’t have to have it recovering from Covid.

( I have found a recipe to re-create the essence of Heinz and given that this lockdown won’t be over by a week on Tuesday, I might give it a try.)

Meanwhile, and I am rather hoping it isn’t a meanwhile, I am thinking of the chip sandwiches my mother brought my sister and I when she came home late from work and we were in bed.

Yes, white bread but from a ‘proper’ loaf, home cooked chips, salt and vinegar – all made by indefatigable grandmother.

These days I have dal as comfort food, cottage/shepherd’s pie ( and I have to say I make a decent lentil version which can be attested to by local neighbours) with homemade pickled red cabbage, posh mushrooms on toast, risotto, aubergine pie, a fish finger sandwich, cheese and jalapeño quesadillas, squid stew – but I am just showing off.

And there is always a tin of Smash in the larder. Remember that? Advertised by aliens? These days only for secret midnight feasts or on the better days of a recovery. No cornflakes from the packet for me.

Can I just point out, these are not to be used in place of proper mashed potatoes – Smash will not work well on the top of a cottage pie.

You need to rootle around the in the fridge and find something to sauté and add in – onions, chillis, sesame oil, tomatoes with oregano, always with a sprinkling of Marigold Bullion … or just butter.

That’s what living in Deepest Sussex does for you, sorry.

Snobbery and Frugality

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Dear reader, this is a post which comes with one of those warnings – this is a blog that contains food snobbery in quite large quantities.

There are some recipes I avoid every time I see them – especially anything titled ‘pasta bake’ or ‘vegetable curry’.

Personally, I can’t imagine the day when I am going to look forward to making or, indeed and especially, eating a tuna and broccoli pasta bake even if it ‘comes bubbling from the oven to the table.’

Broccoli is not a suitable partner for pasta. There, that is it, I said it.

(Now I do realise, I am not having to try to get fish and vegetables into resistant children who will, however, eat anything with pasta. 

Either sell your children, or give them fish fingers, peas and spaghetti hoops.)

Chicken and pasta bake – not really. Chicken and pasta don’t go together and certainly not baked in the oven with cheese.

And the idea of brussel sprouts and pumpkin pasta bake makes me want to weep.

I do realise that lasagne and cannelloni are pasta bakes but not as we know the term and tell me, hand on heart, when did you eat a really delicious lasagne outside of Italy – or even in it, for that matter.

The exception I will make is macaroni cheese – up there with cauliflower cheese as one of the very, very good comfort foods.

The pastas I prefer are long strips of varying width – spaghetti, tagliatelle, pappardelle etc – which don’t lend themselves to baking as far as I know.

A recipe for four cheese baked spaghetti is not convincing me that I am wrong, but in case you differ: https://www.foodandwine.com/pasta-noodles/baked-pasta/baked-pasta-dishes?slide=c079c521-8907-4786-a70e-e9fbc1b88b99#c079c521-8907-4786-a70e-e9fbc1b88b99

The long pastas remind me much more of good Italian meals and I am very prepared to spend time thinking of how to ‘dress’ them – crab and lemon zest, artichokes and olives (both from cans I have to say), squid, peas and tomato sauce ( actually very cheap to make), I could go on….

My sister’s friend’s sister apparently makes the most delicious pasta sauces from all sorts of simple ingredients and I always like hearing the stories of what they ate whilst on holiday – mind you any stories of holidays and good food are at a premium these strange days. 

I salute that woman’s cooking but am pretty sure a pasta bake was not included.

Wondering whether the Italians would also sneer at a pasta bake, I Googled about and found indeed there are all sorts of pasta bakes but they are not called that.

It is all a question of language…….but a closer look does not fill me with delight, pasta bakes with a posher name.

Meanwhile, likewise with anything described as a vegetable curry gets a stiff ignoring from me, as the Best Beloved would say.

This is not because I don’t eat or make them – sag aloo is a delight, dal with crispy fried onions, cauliflower masala, mushroom and pea keema ( thank you Meera Sodha for that and other lovely recipes)……

It is because all those recipes you come across have carrots in them, and I am not a big fan of a carrot – and other root vegetables. (Honourable exceptions include potatoes, of course, fennel and the occasional turnip but never found in any of my ‘curries’.)

The idea that you can curry chunks of carrot and parsnips and sweet potatoes is not getting a toe over my threshold.

I am not saying this is not a good vegetable curry for the people who like that sort of thing, but this is not happening in this part of Deepest Sussex, along with, and I am sorry if I offend anyone, beetroot and aubergine curry. I may rest my case at this point.

I am sure that there is an Indian cook out there who could make me sit and eat a meal with carrots in it which I would then describe as delicious. But that cook is not me.

And, finally on this, ‘curry’ is just too a generic term – it signals to me that the recipe is not going to be great.

( I did warn you about snobbery……)

So, I can happily ignore recipes for vegetable curry and flick past them, but as for pasta bakes the search is on.

We have a lot of none strip pasta. 

This is not as a result of panic buying in March or November or now ( the year marked by panic buying outbreaks, who would have thought?) but because too much pasta was brought into the Free Shop and some ‘shoppers’ suggested I could make some pasta bakes for following week – they apparently had a soft spot for a pasta bake.

You can imagine my delight.

As it happens, I am not volunteering there any more so not cooking for it, but am left with a lot of pasta. (Don’t worry, I have not deprived people of pasta, the Free Shop gets more pasta than it can shake a hat at.)

My plan is to find something I can call something other than ‘pasta bake ‘ and which tastes good but is nevertheless baked in the oven. 

There is already the aubergine pie recipe ( see a previous blog) but there must be more out there which will convert me.

I am not falling for Pasta Al Forno which is basically a bolognese sauce baked with pasta. Come on, there must be something better than that…….

So, in yet another lockdown with weather not conducive to gardening, temperament not conducive to nothing more than necessary when it comes to cleaning, upholstery on hold, dog walking not taking up all of the day, BB working on his great thoughts about the Bexit deal, news of record numbers of Coronavirus cases, my project may well be to find/create a ‘decent’ pasta bake.

Standards

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I went delivering Christmas cards the other day – not something I usually do but it was combined with a dog walk, and that is something I have to do, come rain or shine.

This was rain.

I dropped one off at a friend’s.

Jess and I were what could charitably be described as more than bedraggled. ‘Look like you have been pulled through a wet hedge backwards,’ as my grandmother would have said.

My friend however answered the door in a glamorous black jumper, nicely made up, hair looking good, jewellery properly accessorised.

‘Well it is Christmas and it’s worth making an effort,’ she said.

Likewise, I got reprimanded by another friend for having no, not one, Christmas decoration in the house – at least not one visible from the outside ( and, dear reader, there was indeed not one inside.)

So I went up in the loft, went into the garden and got a bit of ivy, and scattered it along with a carrier bag’s worth of decorations around the house.

( Usually, the reprimanding friend decorates our house for our annual Winter Lunch but not this year….)

But, I can’t say that I went home and blowed dried my hair or put on anything glam – brushing the mud off my jeans was as far as that went.

This lockdown, unlike the previous two, has come as a bit of a depressing surprise. 

For those of us with charmed and easy lives (and I do know that is not true of many people), the first lockdown was all gardening, chatting with neighbours over the fence, organising NHS headband-makers, cooking for the village, and zooms.

November was predicted, and to be honest, didn’t feel much like a lockdown as the traffic was ‘roaring’ round the lanes as people nipped into Waitrose for an ‘essential’ or two, fewer zooms, not as scary, not as sociable……

This one has dark mornings and evenings, bad weather, a threat of a more contagious virus, and it is seriously muddy underfoot.

And there is the battle between ‘why bother’ and ‘keeping up some standards’.

As I spent part of this morning doing the ironing, there was a bit of me thinking why do I need an ironed white shirt when I get up every morning put on those (sometimes brushed) jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper to walk the dog. 

Somehow, I can’t bring myself to wear the white shirt, have to wash and iron it again – indeed there are a lot of clothes in my wardrobe that haven’t, and aren’t likely to, be worn in the foreseeable future.

But being an Aspinall, genetic heritage from my mother and grandmother, cooking carries on.

So, to Christmas lunch.

I asked a shooting villager for a brace of pheasants and in return made him and his family and steak and kidney pie.

In the end he gave me a brace of partridge which I failed to cook properly.

So, we had a (nearly) vegetarian Christmas lunch but ,I would like to point out, sauté potatoes, creamed spinach with nutmeg, sprouts with bacon, cider gravy – so some standards don’t slip in this household.