Sketches from summer

Small moments from the kitchen, and beyond

It’s not always possible to prioritise the pleasurable moments. Amidst life and work and physical exercise and doing the laundry and having the car fixed and renewing the house insurance and taking the dog for regular walks and running a business and hiring and managing and cooking and meeting deadlines and seeing family, friends, there was always going to be a pinch point. 

I’m obsessed with pinch points: trying to predict how and when they occur and how best to navigate them. Or better still, avoid them altogether. There are moments (most nights) when my kitchen is working on slightly too many things. Table six have just arrived and need their canapes, but there is a surprise wheat allergy on table four who are just about to get their bread course so we have to rapidly defrost a gluten-free brioche – but the oven is at the wrong temperature for that, because it’s set to steam the courgette flowers and table two have just told us they only have fifteen minutes in which to finish their dessert courses because the babysitter has just called them so can we get those on the fly please, as well as the petit fours to go – and table one’s first course is ready on the pass but they haven’t had their drinks pairing yet because the bar is backed up thanks to a second round of cocktail orders from table eight, which means we can’t start plating the main courses for table five yet – so instead can we send the amuse to the tables sat right at the pass who need to think that we have the whole situation under control?  Except they haven’t got cutlery.  So we’ll just have to style this one out. 

That’s a pinch point. Sometimes known as the weeds. Or being dans la merde, si tu veux. 

Life gets like that sometimes. The laundry basket belches its contents up and over the top like a clothing mushroom cloud. The fridge contains dozens of condiments but no actual food. The sink is a graveyard of tea-stained mugs and blackened roasting trays. Plans are postponed, cancelled or followed through under duress, the weight of obligation proving to be a force of gravitational magnitude. 

In lieu of individual posts here are some vignettes of things I’ve cooked/made from the recipe books that have been queuing up patiently like well-drilled soldiers, along with intermittent photographic evidence.

1. We always eat family meal at table one. We always call it family meal, never staff food. The rest of the restaurant is laid up with napkins, menus and water glasses. There are several empty blue mushroom crates on the floor next to the bar, next to them five boxes of wine. Outside it’s warm, hot, but in here the air conditioning cools the air.. There is a pan of plantain, spinach and coconut curry, the sauce rich with blended cashew nuts. Rice. Sweet, jammy mango chutney. Ferocious hot sauce. A brief respite from prepping for service. Occasionally our family meal is a hastily warmed pan of tomato soup or three tins of baked beans on Warburton’s sliced white toasted under the salamandar. Most of the time, it is more considered. It’s meant to nourish in more ways than one. We sit. We stop. We eat. We talk. About things and nothings. Of all the dishes we cook at the restaurant, this is the most important one. And it always will be. From Ruby Tandoh’s ‘Cook As You Are’.
   
   

2. A hasty lunch, an over-stuffed wrap, heaving with items foraged from fridge and garden. Leaves and pickles and chutneys and leftover chicken and an outrageous conglomeration of condiments. We’ll never eat this particular selection again, and I’m OK with that, but also a tiny bit sad. (From Ella Risbridger’s ‘The Year of Miracles’)

   

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3. It’s not quite sundowner time, but in the summer that hour comes too late. Glowing in the early evening brightness is a martini glass, its contents pale red and satisfyingly cold. Condensation collects fast on the outside of the glass. Gin infused with toasted fig leaves (suggesting a hint of coconut) mixed with Campari, brutish and complex – the most direct highway to a fuzzy cortex. I think of California, road trips and wine and that pilgrimage we made to The French Laundry, more than a decade ago when we were younger: unburdened by age and consequence. We never made it to The Girl & The Fig restaurant, but that’s a good reason to go back. 

4. The tagine has been cooking for hours, and the chicken thighs are tender. Preserved lemons bring acidity, the assertive briney notes of green olives the necessary salt. It’s a unique interplay of flavours that never fails to remind me of souks, that labyrinth of chaos that even after several visits holds hundreds of secrets. Let’s buy a riad, we said last time. Sell everything and shift our lives over here, to Marrakech. A tiny restaurant, six or seven guest rooms. Maybe one day. Definitely not now. Alongside the tagine, not cous-cous or bread, but potatoes from the garden and courgette fritters, all recipes from Claudia Roden’s majestic ‘Arabesque’. It feels name-droppy but: I can’t help but think of the time I got to cook for Claudia, when she sat at the pass with Bee Wilson. Elegant. Almost untouched by everything else in the world, and yet such a wonderful curator of its foods and cultures and people. Two of the finest food writers alive, nibbling on seeded crackers and hummus. Nothing I served that night was just a dish - each had its history, its influences, its past, present and future. The pasta, stuffed with cavolo nero and ricotta cheese, a classic of cucina povera, and now forever seasoned with Claudia’s gift for a story.

   

    

5. Jars of beans now fill the bottom shelf of the pantry cupboard. Not cans. Jars. We have transcended the tin and I don’t know if we can ever go back, now the delights of a pulse housed in glass has been sampled. Black beans, cooked in spices and garlic and smashed inelegantly with the back of a wooden spoon. They are served with feta cheese, half an avocado, a handful - and then more - of corn tortilla chips and a sluice of perfect hot sauce. Thomasina’s Mexican Food Made Simple is no misnomer.

   

    

6. Manchester, summer 2010. Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson are in conversation on stage and I am in the audience. I cook because of Bourdain, but it wasn’t Kitchen Confidential that fired my interest – if anything it put me off (which I think, perhaps, was his intention). For me, his masterwork remains A Cook’s Tour: that is why I cook. To make memories. The title page of my first edition, kitchen-worn copy of his Les Halles Cookbook is inscribed: ‘To Alex, Best Wishes’ and then completed with a scrawl, perfected over hundreds of signings but somewhat illegible – but I know who wrote it, and that’s all that matters. We cook friseé au lardons, green beans and dauphinoise potatoes: ‘it reminds me of the food you used to cook when we first got together’, you say. For dessert we eat a dense clafoutis with griottine cherries. That, too, tastes of 2007. In the best possible way.

   

    

7. The courgette harvest this year has been bountiful. I take the kitchen team to CoFarm, a couple of kilometres from the restaurant, and we spend an hour or so digging up garlic, picking beans and twisting courgettes to wrench them from their gnarly, rough stems,. For dinner these are sliced and sauteed in olive oil whilst half a bag of (good) penne pasta dances around in rapidly boiling salty water. Lemon juice, torn basil and plenty of fresh ewe’s curd cheese from Culinaris complete a dish that is the essence of summer in a summer that has lacked an essence of its own. We should cook from the River Cafe books more often, and will try to eat there before the year is out.

   

    

8. Every time I eat matar paneer I think of one of Paul Whitehouse’s characters from The Fast Show. Amongst the fried cheese, peas and spices are a few green beans, freshly harvested from the garden. It takes no more than twenty minutes to cook the dish, a stand-out recipe from Meera Sodha’s Fresh India – a book that I’ve cooked from a number of times and never been disappointed by. Cheesy Peas. Brilliant.