in the soil

May’s heatwave past, the weather has broken into fragments, never quite hot but certainly warm enough to work up a sweat under the raincoat made necessary by the occasional downpour, heavy drops of rain as warm as tears which feel solid on the skin and set the leaves of the raspberries and the lemonbalm dancing with the comical speed of clouds in a time-lapse video; between the heat and the rain everything has shot up, tall grass borders crowding against the netting covering the currant bushes, the few spears of asparagus which last week were barely poking out of the soil now erupted into ferns, their season nearly done. As always at this time of year I am surprised by the sudden speed of everything after the long wait of winter - one day I am waiting desperately for something to grow, the next I am wondering where on earth I will sow my summer crops, I have no space for courgettes or for tomatoes or for squash until I pull that bed up or dig over this or until the broad beans are finished. Today I pick a bucket full of them with still more on the plant, and another handful of artichokes too, and am grateful that we finally bought a freezer so that not every meal must consist of broad beans; despite attempts at broad bean miso I have not found a better way of preserving them than podding and freezing or else drying, at the end of the season, when they begin to get large and floury - not long for that now.

in the kitchen

Last week my wife and I hosted a supperclub at Madre bakery which we called Il Pane di Ieri, yesterday’s bread, themed around breadcrumbs and stale bread and the general idea of leftovers. We cooked:

Scotch quail eggs (made with a polpette di pane mix for the vegetarians)

Baked mussels stuffed with seasoned breadcrumbs (baked artichokes for the vegetarians)

Little squares of rye bread smeared with goat cheese and topped with raw little broad beans

the passatelli I tested last week (pasta made with breadcrumbs, egg and grated cheese) with duck & duck offal ragu (with artichokes and green garlic for the vegetarians)

Mocha bread and butter pudding made with Madre’s (award-winning!) chocolate sourdough and custard flavoured with Camp coffee extract

and served some of my ROVO liqueurs afterwards - nocino, “clemencello” - like limoncello but made with very good leafy clementines. (I’ll be selling both of these later in the year btw).

This was all excellent and we had a great time but were also, thanks to a slight miscalculation on my part, left with rather more duck than we needed for our guests. So the last few days have been a duck-processing party - rendering all the bits down for fat, making broth with all the carcasses, confiting two spare legs, freezing two spare breasts, distributing leftover ragu to family members - a celebration of leftovers producing more leftovers, a cyclical way of cooking.

on the page

Book-wise I have mainly concerned with my own forthcoming Allotment Diaries as we gear up towards the release, and I have certainly been involved in more email chains than ever before in my non-office-working life; Adam Bede has mainly been put to one side for the time being. After the allotment my mother lent me Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play. Although I am sure I only noticed a tiny fraction of the references to classic and forgotten crime fiction that my mother (an Agatha Christie obsessive) found in the book I did find it brilliant, a bravura postmodern-literary-puzzle-unflinching-examination-of-grief-affectionate-genre-pastiche, a mystery that is not a mystery, a detective story with no crime committed, often funny and devastatingly sad.