Another school year starts for the little ones, and a new beginning looms elsewhere - number four son is heading off to University and I'm knocking around looking for a fifth set of pans and a few mugs and plates with a kind of deja vue feeling. Tom is excited but trying to remain fairly cool about it all as if it's no big deal. We leaf through the mail order shot from John Lewis and laugh at the NEW student 'must have's. There's something nice and homely about having a handful of hand-me-down cutlery and an old favourite mug, I think. The Bank of Grandma stumps up for a new laptop, thankfully, as it probably wouldn't impress prospective employers for a Computer Graduate to sit there with an old pencil jammed in the side of his laptop to keep the light on...but then again, maybe they'd see ingenuity in the face of a tide of student debt.
I'm watching the hedgerows ripen at lightening speed. The blackberries are already plump and heavy and still full of taste. I take a mental note of the best hedgerows round here and prepare for an afternoon's picking before someone else gets there. There's nothing worse than following on the back of a quick-witted picker who's had the same idea and got there earlier in the day, and to arrive home with half a dozen under-ripe specimens and the feeling of being hard-done-by. This weekend seems just right for a large dish of apple and blackberry crumble. We make ours with half rolled oats to flour for that flapjacky taste my kids love, and a mixture of cookers and eaters so that there are tasty chunks of real apple - the eaters - amongst the sublime mush of puree and muscovado sugar.
The red-haired Hannah is descending on us this weekend from the bright lights of the city and will no doubt have certain food expectations. They find it too quiet and dull here for their flitting minds, my city children. Chris, the other one, is planning to fly over from Frankfurt at Christmas. He calls it 'coming back to the Dale'. Technically right, I know (despite its Hobbit associations), but I am never quite sure if he's being complimentary or not. I have my doubts.
The dish I am making this evening reflects the change in the seasons. I love this time of year with its red and gold leaves and a freshness in the air once more that stimulates the mind. It is a simple casserole of lamb and tomato and smoked paprika which has a warmth in it to both comfort and invigourate (Lamb, garlic, paprika and tomato pg236). As you say, 'There is much comfort in food that has been cooked in a casserole.' These recipes of yours are like stews that have been speeded up to reflect the fact that we may well want to eat dinners like this but often don't have the time to just leave things to cook. This dinner was prepared and cooked and on the table in less than an hour, which is usually my benchmark, and I've never been known as the fastest of cooks - I can quite happily while away half an afternoon chopping a few onions given the chance.
There is something magical about an Indian Summer, like the one we're having right now. We often talk in hope about them, but they come more infrequently than we seem to remember. Perhaps it is the warm breath of air which whips leaves from the trees yet still blows refreshingly across our cheeks. The temperature, a pleasant warmth - warm enough to sit out and have lunch - yet doesn't sap our energy and strength the way a warm day in Summer often does.
We sit out at the weekend with Hannah and eat the fish soup I've prepared. It is the season of soups in my mind, and nothing makes me feel more snug than a real fire in the evening and a bowl of hot soup for lunch. The garden and lane are bedecked with all manner of garden birds, all here for the feast of Autumn-cropping raspberries and hedgerow blackberries. We will agree to share, I think. We get our bird spotter book out and the children have a go at identifying them. I buy another bird feeder but forget the seed. Another visit. It's a thirty mile round trip to the shops so it'll have to join the list. Archie eats diesel, I think, but then again he's doing sterling work doubling as a cupboard for all Tom's mountain of stuff heading off to Uni. The cottage would be more than a little cluttered otherwise.
They say that people are divided into people who clean and people who declutter (and presumably people who can manage neither). I am a declutterer. I can cope with a little bit of dirt...in moderation...but I can't begin to think straight if there are piles of mess everywhere. It's not about being hugely house-proud or anything, but the layout of a space (for some of us) affects how we move and think and relax in that space. I have a friend who is the reverse to me. She has a wonderful living room with huge piles of magazines on which we place our wine glasses. A tower of books at one end is a focus for the eye. Every week she moves all these books and things, hoovers, dusts and then places them all back down as before. I've seen it done and marvelled at her determination to have things back exactly as she would place them. It's a hugely cluttered room with mobiles and wind chimes and sticks of incense everywhere, but opened up and cleaned like a piece of unfolded origami, and refolded once more; it is her space.
Martha
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