Tonight's recipe is for 'my favourite meatballs, ever' (Sausage Balls, Mustard Cream Sauce - pg 129); so I'm expecting great things from you, Nigel. The meatballs and I don't get off to a great start, however, as the non-chef in me is having trouble getting them out of their skins. According to you, I should simply be able to slit them from end to end and pull the skin apart. I thought I'd bought a good batch of sausages but maybe the 40% pork belly (with 40% pork shoulder) is proving too slimy for easy extraction. In the end I resort to cutting the links and squeezing from the middle so that the sausagemeat fires out of each end of the sausage. This at least seems to work. Then I am kneading the sausagemeat with handfuls of thyme, shaping them into small balls. I don't achieve the twenty four you indicate - more like twelve - and the process leaves me cold.
I know, in theory, and from just about every cook on tele, that I should be enjoying squidging this cold, clammy stuff in my hands, but I am not. It is cold and dark outside and I am tired. Being told I should be enjoying something which I am clearly not makes me feel worse. Perhaps I have just spent too much of my adult life with my hand up an unwell chicken's bottom to delight in such things anymore (- the provenance of the over-enthusiastic city farmer in my experience, with his full clobber of 'country' clothing).
The meatballs are gently braising in their covering of stock and looking more like something I may want to eat for supper. I hope my guest will appreciate the effort I've gone to. Meatballs have somehow been one of those standard family dishes that have passed me by. Never having grown up with a can of Campbell's meatballs I suppose I've never tried to emulate it. I'm interested, but I've yet to be convinced. After the cream and Dijon are added it looks more like a cheap tin of tomato soup and I decide to leave it to its own devices - the mercurial magic that only seems to happen when you don't try and meddle.
Molly has been ill all week with a very high temperature so I have been house-bound and am starting to get cabin fever. Luckily she makes some progress in this last day or so and I am able to sprint to the shops for provisions as we are doing a Mother Hubbard here. So I get the ingredients, including some good quality Pappardelle ribbons which will hopefully take up the thin liquid sauce. You say it doesn't thicken and I don't forsee it happening in the next five minutes either. Pappardelle comes from the verb 'pappare' which means to gobble up, apparently. And this is what my guest and I will certainly be doing. He is here already and I am still busy cooking. We are both hungry now.
An ill person in the house is debilitating all round. You know yourself what it feels like to just want to give in to being ill and have someone else pass that drink from the table to you because to move your head would be to set in motion a series of waves which go all the way from one side to the other. And to be wrapped in cashmere and have your pillows plumped is surely what it's all about. The downside to this is, of course, that nothing much else gets done. So a whole week is resigned to the scrap heap, with only a few weak smiles from a pastry-coloured face to let me know that it is appreciated.
There is a level of chatter that can happen anywhere, at anytime - at work, in the pub, at the school gates - which is cyclical and has the power to make you want to run screaming out of your own 'Groundhog day' madness. It may consist of the weather, how much you all hate your boss; or, in our case, why the Honker Bus is late yet again, and whether they are trying to tuck another job in before taking our little ones to school in the next village. For reasons unknown you find yourself involved in these conversations, unable to escape, saying the same platitudes over and over again, whilst you look on with horror at your former self and wonder for the nth time how your life came down to this.
At times like this I have to go and phone a friend who can offer me some sanity. The dog has more wisdom in one wag of her tail, and later we are off up the moors to see the shapes made by a low-lying mist with the sun on it. Hedge trimmers have been out stripping bark from sap and there are jagged pencils sticking from hedgerows all along the roadside. My friend, who is a Peak National Park Ranger here, tells me that all the trees are being individually shaken and checked for safety - a mammoth task. The uncharacteristically wet winter so far has left the meadows boggy and dank. The cows have been moved to drier ground and the sheep are congregating in small groups moaning about the churned up mess the cows have left behind. They stand on the high ground watching as I jump from clod to clod of tufted grass. Men have been known to drown in these parts, they say, lost for weeks beneath a quicksand of mud. We hurry on chasing the last rays of the sun, following the spire of the church in the distance as it guides us home like an upright compass. The sun falls fast at this time of year, faster than we are walking,you and I.
By the time my guest and I sit down to eat and I take my first mouthful you have me convinced. For me, it's not particularly the meatballs that do it, but the sauce....Nigel, you surpass yourself. One may look at the photo and see - meatballs. But dip into the sauce and you just know the whole process that has gone in to making this dish. That toffee-flavoured sticky stuff that melds to a grill pan of sausages has been evaporated and dispersed and only the memory of that flavour is floating on your taste buds. In the cream, in the stock, tickled by the Dijon. The dog's Bollocks indeed.
Martha
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