in the soil

Officially a heatwave, with one record-breakingly hot May day immediately followed by another one, and we find ourselves in not quite the hottest part of it finishing the construction of my mother’s prefab compost bins out of posts and boards that turn out, in the preceding days of rain and hail and then record-breaking heat, to have warped rather badly and need hammering into place rather than slotting neatly together as they should; I am glad we building it next to the hedge, despite unwanted attention from the brambles and nettles, as even in the shade sweat is beading down my forehead to drip down my nose and off into the soil, the sun above like a fever. That done I don’t have a great deal of energy for anything else, certainly not to trim all the grass that needs trimming or to weed all the weeds that need weeding; I scrabble and rootle a few holes in bare soil to sow saved seeds of cucumber Middle East Peace, climbing bean Marvel of Venice and borlotti of some kind, and I pick a big bagful of the larger broad beans, the first glut of the year, at least the same again still swelling on the plants and no sign yet (touch wood, ward off the evil eye) of blackfly. I cut the first few little artichokes and pull up a stem of green garlic to go with them, although unfortunately there is no asparagus ready to make a little home-grown vignarola. The bed needs a good water, to be honest, which I do not do - not because it is too hot at this time of day to water (although it absolutely is) but just because I completely forget, thoughts frazzled by the heat

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in the kitchen

Because of the heat (did I mention the heat?) I have been thinking about dinners which either don’t need the oven on or which can be baked and then left to go tepid while we go out for a walk and the flat cools down. One day we have a warmish salad of charred cauliflower, bulghur wheat and gem lettuce with slices of fried halloumi, the next I decide to make a quiche / flan (I make it in a rectangular enamel pie dish and it’s quite deep, with thick pastry, which feels like it disqualifies it from proper quiche-hood) with leeks and bacon and comté and cheddar (English cheese surely disqualifies it from quiche-hood) and Parmesan, which we have with a big salad (more gem, shredded red cabbage and carrot) and little glasses of cold fizzy wine. I’m testing passatelli for an event we’re doing on Saturday, both the recipe for the dough and the use of an electric meat grinder to shape the fat worms of breadcrumb and eggs and cheese, so we’ll have those for dinner; just a pan of boiling water required, and a little pan to cook some of my allotment broad beans for the condimento.

on the page

If I’m honest the flan / quiche was inspired not just by the weather but also by Thea Everett’s Substack post from 3 years ago which somehow came to my attention and especially by reading Theresa Präauer’s Cooking In The Wrong Century (translated by Eleanor Updegraff), a strange little novel about hosting and socialising and hospitality which tells the story of an intimate dinner party in stops and starts, rewinding and replaying the evening with variations minor and major (one guest or another is fashionably late, embarrassingly late, charming, rude, it wraps up early, it goes on late, the police arrive, is there an orgy?) but which all involve the same menu, centred on a classic Quiche Lorraine for which you could pick up the recipe, if you wanted to, dotted around on pages between chapters / retellings, bacon, leek & onion, gruyere (they didn’t have gruyere at Tesco hence my comté), eggs, cream, pastry enriched unlike mine with an egg, and around several bottles of crémant, cheaper than Champagne, chicer than the supermarket prosecco we had with ours.