I is for Inexplicably good

Dear Nigel,

Most of life seems to be inexplicable, it seems to me. Things either work or they don't. Food is either inexplicably good or bad but rarely indifferent. Sometimes the culprit is easily spotted and dealt with swiftly - too much seasoning in a casserole, add a potato and let the saltiness disappear. Sometimes, of course, it's too late and it's 'eat it or starve'.

On the other end of the scale are those memorable meals where the inexplicable something is usually the catalyst between one ingredient and another. These are the meals we mark out as sublime, and they can be anything from salt and vinegar on chips to truffle oil on wild mushrooms. This is the outcome I am hoping for with a simple comfort food dish of potatoes on a wild and windy March afternoon when it is better to be in than out, with the hailstones clawing my face as I screw my eyes up and make a dash to the car. The dish is 'Potatoes with Spices and Spinach' ( pg 263).

I am inviting my new friend over here for the first time. He is a Designer, and the one thing about Designers is that they notice everything. Including the dirt. So I am cleaning like there's no tomorrow. Of course I know it doesn't matter in the slightest. And yet it does; this time at least. Dirt is the one thing we do well over here. It is a different kind of dirt to the clogged up London air. This dirt arrives on foot, usually. The dog rarely wipes her feet on the specially-constructed dirt-trapper mat, preferring to jump over it so that she can make perfect paw prints on the tiles. The children are better organised to remove their wellies as they fly in off the moors leaving a trail behind them all the way to the television of boots, coats, and trousers often-enough. The village lanes are cleaned almost weekly now but the off-load of constant tractors fresh from the fields is a constant trial. I want to send the children to school in shoes like everyone else but the obstacle course of mud makes it impractical until it all starts to dry up a bit.

This simple meal is basically another take on the humble roast potato. I ask myself why I've never made this before as I sit down to eat. It's lovely. But when I think of making roast potatoes they are always accompanied in my mind by a roast meat. It's the way I was brought up. Most of us in this country, I expect. So how to get from there to a dish like this. I have often eaten a dish like this when out, but never cooked it myself. Yet it's so ridiculously easy. How can we change the habits of a lifetime and create new ones. Do I need to cook this week in week out until it is embedded in my subconscious, or do I have to deliberately turn to the recipe every time. I want to be able to look at a potato and say, 'this will make a fine dinner today.' I want to move my socialisation process and coat those potatoes in spices and yoghurt, instead of gravy and redcurrant jelly. As you say, the dish is 'hot, cool, crisp, soft' and inexplicably sublime. It is a dish without meat where none is intended, and comfort on a blustery day. It is also very inexpensive to cook, which makes it hugely attractive to me right now. The sublime bit for me comes with the interplay between hot and salty. I think maybe I have overdone the sea salt, but no, it is simply the heat of the cayenne and chilli bringing out the tang of the sea. As a marmite girl this is completely up my street.

There is a newly-rotavated vegetable patch waiting for me to sow now. I am holding fire a little while longer as the morning frosts still linger. I think a couple more weeks will give even the hardiest little seedling more of a fighting chance. I'm thinking we might have missed the snow this year, though it is still very cold out of the sunshine. I only want to plant things this year that will work hard for their money - cut and come again salads and perpetual spinach; that sort of thing. The rhubarb creates a pretty hedge with its leggy pink stems and will soon need pulling. Every year it gets stronger and better. Last year's newbies are feeble in comparison to the rude health of the previous year's stock. I am trying different varieties - early and late- to try and extend the season. The spinach has designer lacework courtesy of a myriad of insects, no doubt. We eat that which would never grace any restaurant table and it is none-the-worse for its doily-like effect.

Each day we wave to old Nigel as he goes back and forth down the lane in his huge red tractor, taking bales of hay to the cows. He is my five o'clock wake up call drifting in to my subconscious and priming me for the series of more insistent alarm calls from my phone. The other day he passed us with his one year old grandson sitting up front, grinning from ear to ear. Young and old together. The next generation of farmers in training.

Martha

A guest at my table - Mrs M

I am looking at a salt and pepper grinder in John Lewis. One click and there is pepper, turn it round and pure white sea salt is dispersed with a second click. People are like this, sometimes; like politicians appealing to every denomination and social strata they click and turn, click and turn. I want my pepper mill to grind pepper, my salt mill salt. They are different heights, different weights and I can see them on a dark night with the lights turned down low without having to squint. They are comfortably permanently the same. This is how I want them to remain.

It is the Autumn of 1981 and a new term at a new college has begun. There is a river of oil on water as the products of two diametrically opposed educational systems seek to merge, or spar. This is the Conservative heartland of Henley-on-Thames. George Harrison is ensconced next door and the local MP has too much make-up on his face from too many television appointments. He is Michael Hesseltine. He thinks in coming here to this little sixth form college in his own backyard that he will have an easy ride. He is wrong. There is a battle going on between the plummy debs and the backyard Stanleys and the lines have been drawn. This is a state school still, but infiltrated en masse by a lobby of partly-educated private and public school adolescents whose parents seek to skim the cream off a state education beacon of excellence. We don't recognise it as such - the plebs without another place to go - it is our nearest and only college within miles of this warren of tiny villages we all inhabit.

The stage is set for a pageant. The principle arrives in flowing robes and a special song is installed in us and reverberates. We state school pupils role our eyes and look for the exits. And there, standing on the stage in the line up of performing clowns is Mrs M. She looks bemused and alert as she gazes from face to face, checking out what the winter winds have blown in for her to sculpt.

The building is a Victorian Gothic fantasy, much like Harrison's, but half way down the drive, hidden by trees and a mountain of rhododendron bushes are a couple of seedy old portacabins - much like any well-thumbed state school - where a cauldron of discontent and future subversives is brewing. This is where the Politics and Sociology classes have been ousted to; to be tolerated at a distance. Mrs M roars up in her sports car and parks it round the back. Her hair is expensively maintained and immaculate. She is bright, articulate with red nails and a Bank Manager husband heading the large fort back home. She talks of equality and an education system for all before collecting her own sons from boarding school for the weekend. She has seen both sides of the street and decided for herself which one to stand on. This is easy for she is pretty and shiny whilst emitting with passion ideals formed in the hot bed of the LSE. We love her for her passion. We tolerate her dichotomy in a world she seeks to change by engaging minds and sowing seeds.

There is a gradual melding of two social systems as we try to become more alike. Toffee-nosed airs are ripped down and grungy clothing is ubiquitously the order of the day. A uniform of  black is taking over in the politics block. CND badges replace the old school blazer laudatum and enquiring minds are put to work uncovering the blinkers and the legacy of social backgrounds. There is anger, there is hunger and a thirst for new ideas and political ideals. Reality does not intervene with all its mundane certainty as Mrs M keeps court. Back to the hall for the week's drill of gowns and flamboyant lecturing. Back to the Nissan hut for a quick roll up and decoding of the subversive indoctrination we've all been party to. One system seeks to neutralise the other. It is ping pong and we are the vacuous white balls in play.

I am putting the dish of Chicken and Spelt on the table as my guest comes flying in on a wave of energy, her eyes darting everywhere, the light in them flickering as she surveys the room. I am wanting to know how the intervening years have mellowed her; whether her ideals have faded at the edges as the will to fight ebbs; or whether the energy to cultivate young minds is as fresh as it ever was. A good teacher carries her pupils along on a wave of passion and discovery. Mrs M was born to teach.

H is for Hankering

Dear Nigel,

I may have a bone to pick with you this time, Nigel - in fact several bones as it happens. I have a hankering to make your recipe for 'Ras el Hanout Chicken and Spelt' (page 189), but when it comes down to going out shopping I find the ingredients a little elusive to say the least. The pearled spelt I eventually track down in a health food shop, but the chicken wings are unavailable everywhere I go. Perhaps in London with its ethnic diversity it's a different matter but in Ashbourne, anyway, there is no demand for them is seems.

I am beginning to think I might have to substitute a few chicken drumsticks but I can just imagine the comments coming back...'that chicken never flew'...etc Eventually I track some down but even then the butcher says it is for a special order otherwise he wouldn't have had any in either. That said, by the time my guest and I sit down to eat, I know exactly why it has to be wings. There is a claggy stickiness to them that is just so moreish it is worth the hunt. The pearled spelt is a new one on me but it seems to take on the rich flavours as it plumps up, and makes a nice change to normal rice. Another quick and tasty recipe with a waft of Morocco on the plate.

I saw my first Spring lambs this week playing in a meadow, all cotton woolly and new. When they jump it is as if they are tiny puppets on strings being lifted vertically in the air on all four feet. It feels as if it has been a very long winter this year and the first couple of days of real sunshine almost seem unreal. It is warm-enough to eat in the garden on Sunday for the first time. There is lots of over-enthusiasm for these first few rays of sun. Everywhere, it seems, there are tons of pale bare flesh being aired as if a tropical heatwave is on its way.

The good thing is the weather has dried up some of the mud in the meadows and we are less in danger of losing our wellies trying to cross the stile. The rhubarb is shooting up and the flowering currant is about the burst forth. There is an air of Spring around even though there is often a low-hanging mist in the early mornings. As we are high up near the moorlands here it's not surprising. The sun burns it off by mid-morning and the air of mystery surrounding it is lost. The tabby cat stretches out on top of the woodshed as if she is ironed flat with a leg at each corner; maximum surface area soaking up the heat like a little solar panel. She is in her element, drunk on sunshine, with a Cheshire cheese smile going from whisker to whisker. Don't wake me, she says.

My Tom has been away for his University interview, dressed in his suit all dapper, without the apron strings of his mum to tie him down. I think, should I have gone with him after all, despite his protestations? But no, that would be for me. He wants to be independent and confident, without me clucking round him. They offer him a conditional place; perhaps now he'll put some work in...

John has been rotavating the vegetable patch again and a path is going down tomorrow he tells me. Usually by now the seeds are bought and planned out on paper. Why am I being so tardy this year, I ask myself? It is as if I have forgotten a part of myself I left outside last summer and have yet to reclaim and make mine. I start from the house working outwards. The windows wide open, the paths being swept. I remove all the gravel I threw on there to make traction in the ice which never really came this time. It is looking more as if someone lives here, someone who cares. The harsh sun obliterates the windows with their crust of winter grime - another job to do. There is a cleaning woman inside me desperate to get out. I'd better make the most of her - she doesn't come this way often. The vegetable patch can wait a few more days. I hack off some of the dead stuff in the flower bed that I should have done away with last Autumn but didn't. It has ceased to be sculptural and now just looks dank. Every tweak is an improvement. Spirits lighten as fresh winds blow in and the washing dances on the line. Spring is nearly here.

Martha

A guest at my table - Mathew and Andy

The year is 1997 and I am travelling to York University to meet a group of people I have never seen before and who will, by the end of the next week, have become like close family if only for a short, intense time. This is the Open University Summer School programme. All of us have spent the entire year individually deep in assignments, books and late night television programmes (although most were starting to appear on video, thankfully) and now we are here all together. I think I have travelled a long way, coming up from Cornwall, until I meet the others. I find myself in a minority, suddenly, as people fly in in drips and drabs from all corners of the earth.

It is an essential requirement of the courses that people attend Summer School, and every help is made available for those with tiny babies, those who have to bring whole families with them, the old, the disabled, service men and women stationed on the other side of the world. There are no exceptions.

I hadn't realised when I started this History degree that it would be so dominated by the army. The services pay/or help pay for servicemen stationed overseas to be able to study for a degree, and many of them fit it in with night work or long periods of waiting. In my group are two young men roughly the same age as me; Mathew is a young officer in his early thirties working undercover for the MOD in Eastern Europe. Andy is part of a Bomb disposal squad in Northern Ireland. It is a difficult time for both of them. Over in Ireland, the Real IRA are waging a campaign against the British security forces, culminating in the Omagh bombing which would occur the year after this. Over in Albania, the United Nations Security Council had, in March, authorised a force of 7,000 to direct relief and restore order to Albania, to try and prevent the unrest from spreading outside the country. Both men have young families back home, and young wives who have mental health problems. You can perhaps pick and train men to be mentally strong in these situations but you can't pick their families. It is an added burden they both share. It is not something I have ever thought about before.

Mathew has dark wavy hair and glasses and unusually pale skin. He is calm and controlled and never seems to become particularly animated by any of the discussions. He is thoughtful and incisive and brings a deeper interpretation to our joint projects. It is interesting to see how different minds work in the same situation. Other people make you look at things in a different way, if they are able to communicate their thoughts properly. Andy shows me a different side. He isn't as intellectual as Mathew but his take on things is totally unique. He breaks things down into a step-by-step approach. Every step provides a choice, but each of these choices lead to a pre-determined step. He is applying his skills as a bomb disposal expert to the deconstruction of an assignment question. He is slightly younger - perhaps in his late twenties still- with a regulation crew cut and square jaw. He is charismatic and witty yet never out of control of the situation. He is an interesting mix, and lives on the hyped-up adrenalin that his job gives him; yet in a controlled and confined sort of way. He isn't a man to shout.

The week plays out in a heightened state for all of us. These events are notable for this I think. Each night we find we are still talking at four or five in the morning, no one wanting to give in to the dull ache of sleep. It is the finite time limit that makes this all the more imperative. And the bug is catching. By the end of the week even the older members who have taken themselves off to bed on the first couple of nights are hanging out in the halls with the dwindling supplies of alcohol and crisps, their wrinkles pinned back and their eyes glistening with fire.

My guests have arrived at the correct time for our dinner of lamb cutlets. They are still in their late twenties and early thirties, and, although I want to find out how the intervening years have left their mark, they are unable to tell me what they cannot know. The world is a different place today. Their conflicts are just another page in the history books; another question on a University exam paper. These young men are helping to write that history, even as they examine the questions from another time. Perhaps all wars and conflicts throw up the same universal questions and issues, and, in answering those, they are seeking to answer their own. Their worlds are very far apart and yet the questions are the same.

G is for Greens are good for you

Dear Nigel,

Having decided what we are having for dinner tonight - Lamb cutlets with mustard seed and coconut (page 167) - and shopped diligently, I am left looking at a cabbage. The recipe calls for 300g Savoy or other dark-leaved cabbage to accompany the cutlets. The crinkly-veined, dark skinned beauty and I regard each other with suspicion. Every time I pass on my way towards the fridge she is there, glowing. I haven't let cabbage pass my lips since....ooh, 1974 I think. The way that children do, I decided that I didn't like cabbage. And that was that. It's amazing how many plates of school dinners, posh dinner parties, close relatives, distant friends you can manage to avoid offending whilst still sticking to your code of 'those things which I do not eat'. But now the greatest test is questioning your own judgement; seeing whether the absolute decision of a nine year old child should still control the choices of a 48 year old woman. I'm hoping that a new way of cooking the said cabbage - in this instance it is to be shredded and fried in a little butter and/or oil - will provide new more pleasant memories.

I had to take Poppy to the Vet yesterday to have some stitches out. Ours is a large animal veterinary practice, primarily, serving most of the farms in our local area. So it wasn't surprising, really, to find two cartoon character farmers standing in front of me in the queue complaining about the new changes in the forms for TB testing and the tightening up of regulations. Did they want their heifers testing or didn't they? Well, that was a difficult one...The queue for open surgery was getting longer and longer. Big dogs and small dogs, all with uncanny resemblance to their owners, came in through the door. But rules is rules and the receptionist was having none of it - no doubt she'd heard it all many times before. How many heifers did they want testing now? Still no decision. You'd think some farmers had all the time in the world. She tried a different tack, played on the solidarity thing of other moaning farmers she had known. You could almost hear the cogs turning, thumb screws going on. They knew they were going to have to go through the hoops, like it or not. At what point we all wanted to know were they going to back down and grump off in their landrover back to the farm. The vet would be round before Friday and the cows scanned and tested she said. A dob of flat cap and out they marched in their wellies. The old vicarage (now the veterinary centre) breathed a collective sigh of relief and business resumed once more.

There is a wonderfully aromatic scent as I mix the spices into a paste with the coconut cream and roll the cutlets in it. I am looking forward to this dish. I am still unsure about the cabbage but decide that it will be fried in a fairly generous amount of butter and hopefully that will do the trick. There is always something else to be done whilst meat is marinading, and in this case it involves feeding the dog before she takes a liking to lamb cutlets. I find hiding it in the microwave prevents excavations of the canine/feline type. There is a lovely gentle warmth to the smell of the cutlets griddling in their sticky coating. In the end I find I want to keep all the sticky half-burnt marinade and chuck it on top as this has some of the best flavours. And as for the cabbage...well, it was really rather nice. And my guests agree too.

Kevin was out planting a new hedgerow this morning on the edge of the hill looking down the valley at the bottom of Old Eric's farm. It has the most amazing views but is also an exposed and windy spot. The winds of late have brought huge trees crashing down all over the place. Lots of old Oak trees and others with shallow roots loosened by the heavy rains and then blown over by the subsequent winds. Over at my friend Yuri's farmhouse a huge tree came down on their chimney a week or so ago. I arrive to pick her up for coffee and find lots of men with chain saws busy at work. It has cracked the end wall of the house and traumatised the children, who thought an aeroplane had hit the house. It is odd to see so many large old trees lying roots up in the air. When you look at how shallow their roots systems are to support such fine old specimens, it is amazing that they survived this long, I think. There will be plenty of good wood around for local craftsmen to work on anyway.

Martha

A guest at my table - Johnathan

He is one of my oldest friends; I have known him nearly all my life. Coming through the door he bobs his head as he wipes his feet roughly on the mat and comes over to give me a kiss as I stand, oven gloves in hand, by the stove. We are having fish cakes tonight, the significance of which won't have eluded him. I chivvy him over to the table and take pan to plate. Better to eat it whilst it's hot.

Johnathan has a light tan from a day's climbing and is cruising on a wave of adrenalin and fresh air. He wears a simple navy crew neck jumper and jeans over his slim frame. He is a good looking guy yet everything is understated about him. Nothing is out of place and nothing shouts to be noticed. But people notice him and love him for his integrity and his kindness.

Having spent years living in London and escaping only at weekends, he has now planted himself firmly in his beloved Yorkshire, the place of his birth. He has come home. His hair is close-cropped, greying only slightly though he is heading towards forty now. There is a criss-cross pattern on his forehead with fine wrinkles going both ways that belie some of the strains and stresses in his life which stay firmly under wraps. He is an intensely private person.

Now and then he breaks to go outside for a cigarette. But not when we're eating. I tell him of our problems; he sympathises and mends things where he can. Each time there is a list of jobs that need doing - mainly mending things which the kids have broken, drilling holes, fixing screws. He is good at that. He can take a 'to do' list and cross them off one by one until they are done. This takes willpower and patience which he has in buckets and of which I sense mine are seriously depleted.

It is a fine sunny day and we are standing in the most beautiful garden I have ever seen. It isn't large but every single flower in it is at its best and perfect just for today. The gardeners keep it that way. Earlier in the morning we have been at the hospital. I am not afraid of such places. For me, my main contact with hospitals has been with the happy times of bringing children into the world. Of flowers, and cards, and people visiting with huge smiles on their faces. Today it is an impersonal place, the staff busy with their work.
'Let's get out of here,' he says, a slight note of irritation in his voice. But only slight. There are no fond farewells just a form to sign, and we are gone. It is a relief to get out of the air conditioning and into the sunshine and breathe fresh air once more.

The new place is welcoming, in contrast. And here we stand in the garden; this perfect garden which has to be perfect for today and for every today; for every today is someone's last here. My little girls are one and two, dressed in matching buttercup yellow dresses and little hair slides pinning up their curls. Their outfits have been so carefully chosen, as has mine, today, for every little thing matters. The meaning of everything has to be the largest that it can be;  the elephant that is squashed inside the room beside us is taking up all the space there is.

And this is when I notice something else about Johnathan, something I had inwardly suspected but never managed to explain to myself. I saw his dying in my own terms. I wept, I cried, I emptied buckets and gave myself headaches; but it changed nothing. He sits us all down in a semi-circle facing him. Like the most Regal of kings he sits calmly and sedately on his wheelchair throne and explains to us in completely matter-of-fact terms how his next few weeks will be managed, what treatments there would be to alleviate his suffering, how his decline would most likely go. And all this without a single tear being shed or a flicker of fear or pain.

I have never seen a man choose to manage his own dying in this way, with such dignity and fortitude. They seem like values of a bygone era that are rarely seen these days where feelings are encouraged to be expressed at every occasion, however trivial at times. And yet he is far from being a man who is unable to express his own feelings.

As I look into his face I realise I can see completely through his nose. The blood has withdrawn itself along with the cancer and the nose is like glass. I fancy that if I touch it it will shatter in my hand. When it comes to the time to leave he gets up, with supreme effort, out of his wheelchair to stand on his one remaining leg so that we can hug. I give him a pained look as I stand back, turning my head diagonally to look at him as I do so. He mirrors me, one way and the other. We have talked.

A week later he is dead. The roses in the garden are just as perfect on the day he died.

And, although it is the saddest of saddest things, he is with me now eating enough fish cakes for two with the metabolism of a gangly teenager. And will always be with me. I promised him that I'd live for the two of us - and it can be quite exhausting trying to live two people's lives - and I try to hold on to something of the dignity with which he bore his dying when I'm faced with all the rubbish and adversity with which my own life seems to have had more than its fair share of (or so it seems to me).
For it is nothing in comparison.

F is for 'Far from the Madding Crowd'. And Fish

Dear Nigel,

From the moment we moved here nearly two years ago now I knew we'd done the right thing. Growing up in tiny villages myself, and also with my older children, I wanted Sophie and Molly to know a country childhood in all its simplicity and groundedness. In every way it has been 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and I love its closeness and quirkiness as much as anything. My friend Lucy Sheeran, who lives locally, does these wonderful minimal style prints (www.lucysheeran.co.uk).

Another friend looks at it and says, 'But..' And I know what she's going to say, because she doesn't get it at all. She's going to say 'but you don't own it, it doesn't belong to you.' And it's true, we rent. But then, I don't own the cottage next door either, or the stream behind which cuts into the landscape, or the church spire in the distance. And yet, for all that, there is somehow more permanence here in this captured moment in the snow than in any for sale sign going up or down. We seek to grasp on to things and pin them down but what is really ours to keep? Things change constantly - children grow up, spouses leave, people die - things happen beyond our control and all we ever really have are the memories of those moments. Things we hold dear, even homes, can crumble into dust in a moment's carelessness.

I am looking for a good fish recipe to make that will use some of the wonderful smoked fish that I buy at Robson's smoke house in Craster, Northumberland, just down the road from my mum's, where we come for a few days holiday. I can buy it back home but this has the kind of provenance and depth of flavour that feeds my soul. I find your recipe for 'Smoked Haddock and Leek Cakes' (page 203). It is simple enough and yet the leeks give it that added dimension. The recipe is for lumpy, rough-textured fish cakes which I guess will be more like patties. I think this might be more my kind of fish cake anyway, though I wonder what the troops will make of it. In your cookery thoughts you mention that a more classic result could be obtained by mashing the potato to a cream, but I think not today. I am in want of a bit of novelty, and for my guest to know that I didn't just open a packet from the freezer department of the supermarket.

The fishcakes are quick and easy to make. The potatoes don't need peeling, the leeks soften and the haddock poaches whilst the potatoes boil. Then a quick mix and into the frying pan in rough patties, shaped with the help of a serving spoon and a spatula as the mixture is quite loose. The only quibble I have regards checking for the opaqueness of the cooked fish. The oak-smoked haddock I bought was a rich copper colour whose opaqueness was simply not to be fathomed. I kept my eye on the clock and guessed that the ten minutes you suggested would be adequate. It was.

All in all, another lovely recipe; quick and easy to make. There seemed an awful lot of leeks at first but they soon cooked right down and their addition to the fish cakes is just right. Sometimes smoked haddock can be a bit much and apt to repeat itself over and over again; so this recipe is good because it tempers the flavour. I thought the potato would be more chunky and maybe it was just the variety I used but it was only mildly lumpy, along with the leeks and haddock. 'Comfort food,' my mum said, substantial food for an older person, I thought, or anyone getting over an illness. But tasty, very very tasty all the same.

We watched the fishing boats coming in to the little harbour at Seahouses this afternoon. They were unloading crates of crabs, and lobsters with their pincers tied together; not much fish. Most of the boats were up out of the water having their bottoms scraped and a bit of paint and repair. The lifeboat passed on a routine practise run and the flat bottomed boats which take divers out to the wrecks were moored up to the harbour wall. Billy Shields, though, was still running trips to see the seals on the Farne Islands and all along the coastline the sand dunes were falling away onto the beaches as the storms of late have carved away at them from beneath making them unsafe to play in.

Martha