Tag: eating together

What would you spend your last £100 pounds on?

Saturday night’s menu

I was presenting a local radio panel show once, during a Lent series, and our subject was money. I said my bit (which hasn’t really changed over the decades), along the lines that I’d spend it on a lovely, memorable experience that would at least feed my imagination over the lean times. Spending the last £100 pounds on value range baked beans would just crush me. We were always hard up and so I can remember with wonderful clarity the day we sat on Seatown beach with a large crab that we’d just scratched enough money together to buy. We smashed our way into it with pebbles and ate with our fingers as we swigged a bottle of cheap Soave which we’d dangled in the sea to cool down.

Almost as soon as the phone lines were opened an irate bank manager (remember them?) called in to berate me. “You’re the kind of customer that makes my life impossible” – he barked. Point taken but I never thought it was part of my life’s mission to keep bank managers happy.

On Saturday the whole family drove from our various homes to meet for a walk in the sunshine on the Malverns. We met at British Camp, celebrating one of the boys’ birthdays – it’s a special place for all of us because we spent so much time in a borrowed cottage nearby when they were children. The trees were still stunningly colourful in the autumn sunshine and we could see right across the Vale of Evesham towards Bredon hill with the River Severn making a sinuous course through it. From the very top of British Camp you can easily see Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, and looking west you can see Hay Bluff and parts of the Brecon Beacons. We prefer the British Camp/ Herefordshire Beacon end of the Malverns to the Worcestershire Beacon end because once you get away from the crowds around the Iron Age fort, it rapidly gets quieter and if you’re lucky it can even feel remote – although wet winter days can be a bit trying!

After the walk and the obligatory teas at Sally’s Place the grandchildren and their parents went back to Bristol while the rest of us drove across to Birmingham where we were staying overnight.

That’s enough of that, though, because we’ve always loved a good party and our oldest, whose birthday we were celebrating, had made a reservation for Tropea in March – it gets busy there. You can see the menu at the top, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to know that it’s all too easy to run up a whopping great bill. The ghost of the bank manager must have absented himself altogether from my mind because between the five of us we ran up the largest bill I’ve ever seen on a till roll.

But then, life’s nasty, brutish and short – especially under this wholly incompetent and morally bankrupt government – and having a great time together felt like an act of resistance. The food, the wine and the ambience were brilliant and the owner was such a compelling guide to the food it would have been churlish not to take his word for it and order almost everything. We’ve eaten in a lot of Italian restaurants both here and in Italy and honestly this was paradise. It was as if we were eating in the owner’s house in Tuscany, being spoilt rotten by a crack team of Nonnas. Sadly it’s precisely these marvellous restaurants that are most likely to fold under this latest kicking by the bankers and their pals in government. Of course we couldn’t afford it but we chose – like the moral grownups we all are – to eat beautifully rather than sensibly and as soon as we got home I was planning to teach myself to cook the dishes we’d so liked. Better to think of the bill as a kind of down payment on ten years of pleasure. I asked if I might marry the chef but she was already married and partnered in business to the host- and in any case Madame was keeping a close eye on proceedings and gave me a threatening look, so we feasted through the eighteen plates we’d ordered making those little grunty noises that – as a cook – I love to hear.

As we walked through Harborne the Christmas lights were on. “Why are they putting them up so early?” – someone said. I knew exactly why. We’ve had the Tories in power for twelve years and they’ve all but run the economy into the ground. For me leaving the EU was like being rendered stateless. Life has got progressively worse as the support systems we relied upon were monetised, sold off and run down. We had Covid and lockdowns and now, like 17th century doctors, they decided that one more bleeding was what we all needed. Resistance is futile they try to convince us, but resistance is everything. Loving, carousing, delighting, laughing and feasting; generosity, faith in the future, cooperation and mutual respect are like tank traps to the soulless and mechanised descendants of that miserable bank manager who went after me on the radio.

So if you ask me what I’d spend my last £100 on you already know the answer; and by the way – the owners of Tropea aren’t Italian at all, they’re both Brummies. That’s resistance!

Heaven is kitchen shaped

Thankfully, glass milk bottles are at last popping up in Bath!

More rainy days, and so the Potwell Inn kitchen becomes the centre of the universe again. Summer has fled but in compensation we are bringing back so much food from the allotment we’re almost glad it’s raining today. Early this morning, before the rain came, we went up to collect more tomatoes and before we’d finished picking the clouds darkened and the rain began sheeting down. Ironically that just made it more fun and we larked about and laughed with the water running down our necks as we picked tomatoes, apples, beans and figs to fill the preserving jars. We’ve used up so many jars this year I’ve had to order more, and now, as I’m writing this, the flat is full of the perfume of roasting tomatoes, shallots, herbs and oil which I’m about to turn into a batch of rich passata.

Bottling and preserving is one of the greatest compensations for the loss of summer, and storing food for the winter becomes a fulfilling challenge. Freezers are all very well, but brining, pickling, fermenting and bottling all add complex flavours to their raw ingredients, and can bring a taste of summer to a February meal, and in any case glass preserving jars can be stored without using electricity or gas and they can be used over and over. We use different types of jar for different purposes – Kilner jars, for instance are good for pickles because there’s no metal to come into contact with the vinegar fumes, and we always keep a supply of new rubber rings for them, and lids for jam jars because we avoid using them more than once. A fresh top costs much less than a whole jar of spoiled preserved fruit, and if you bulk buy jars and lids from a beekeeping supplier rather than a kitchen shop they’re miles cheaper. Of course you can recycle old jam jars too, but I find that cellophane tops held on with elastic bands and waxed discs won’t protect the contents nearly as well as a new lid, although my mother and grandmother used nothing else.

As you can see, the Potwell Inn kitchen is a bit of a galley really – nothing big or grand about it but we’ve always bought the best equipment we can afford because it lasts so much longer. The oldest Pyrex bowl, which is used several times a week, is 53 years old, full of warm roasted tomatoes right now, and still going strong.

I’ve written often about the fact that growing, cooking and eating your own produce is much more significant than saving a few pennies. It’s no accident that so many of the world’s religions celebrate their key moments through gathering and eating. Day by day we see people passing our window on their way into work – heads down or talking into their mobiles – drinking coffee, eating snacks on the hoof and engulfed by their headphones in a solitary world. When our family were young we had instances of their school friends who came to our house and had never eaten a meal at the table before. Tables are great! gatherings are great too, and eating together is a constant joy through which we renew relationships and share meals that express continuity. Arguing, laughing and joshing one another around a table is one of life’s great pleasures and while I’m cooking for such a gathering I’m always thinking of the people who will eat the food and trying to remember what they love and what they don’t. In restaurants they call it “service” and that’s not a nod to an obsequious tradition of waiters and customers – it’s about treating a customer as well as you would your best friend. Ready meals eaten in front of a quiz show on the telly simply don’t do it for me.

Maybe there should be a slow eating movement to complement the slow cooking one. Growing your own food and, where you can’t, buying locally from growers and farmers you trust and living well but frugally, means you can live better, eat better and waste less while doing something for the environment at the same time.

And so, today in the kitchen I’ve been in heaven. You might disapprove of the way I use vegetables that might be thrown away by cutting off the bits that have been chewed by slugs or grubs and using the rest, or the fact that I try to think of something to cook with leftovers, but if you’d spent months growing them and dealing with their problems, or gone out in six inches of snow to make sure they were well covered maybe you’d see waste differently. What’s really left after all the re-purposing can still be recycled; “leave no trace” applies as much in the kitchen as it does on a weekend, camping on Dartmoor.

Anyway that’s enough about the Potwell Inn kitchen. Our flat is quite small, and every nook and cranny is filling up with winter stores. Leaving our European neighbours in an acrimonious divorce will (not “could” – will) lead to food shortages in the new year, let alone the disruption that will almost certainly be caused by a surge in Covid 19 infections, and so I feel like I’m channelling my parents and grandparents who knew what food rationing felt like; although I don’t think we’ll be keeping a pig secretly. However our friends with the damson tree phoned this morning and invited us over for a socially distanced picking, so there will be more jam, vodka and even – if there are enough – some chutney to be made. I’m sure the family will be pleased to help us out with the forbidden carbs at Christmas

Finally, on the allotment yesterday, while the sun shone, we cleared away the remains of the sweetcorn to leave access to both sides of the borlotti beans. We’ve had a first taste of the new crop of borlotti in one of Madame’s thick beany soups and they’re lovely – well worth eating young. As soon as they’re harvested we can clear the bed and start to prepare for the new pond. Weather permitting there’s a good deal of carpentry to be done before winter sets in. Life really is good at the Potwell Inn.

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