From Eal­ing to Athens in less than a week

I can­not offer a decent expla­na­tion for how long I have been since last writ­ing: it’s an odd com­bi­na­tion of 1) hus­band being home dis­tract­ing me in any num­ber of ways, the most recent being our obses­sive ten­nis play­ing. 2) I have no new chap­ter ideas for my book that are really hot­ting me up, so I feel a bit like a failed writer. 3) too many inter­est­ing things pile up and then it’s like the photo album: I can face a pile of 40 pho­tographs, but 400? I just want to pull the duvet over my head and look away.

So here I am, mid­week on a sul­try, oppres­sive, grey, sprinkly day, and can I tell you some­thing very briefly? We were bur­gled the other night. Real peo­ple in our real house as we really slept, steal­ing our things. Includ­ing our… car. Our beloved Mini Cooper. So at the risk of, as my dear friend Jo says, spoil­ing your visions of my life as a Shangri-la, a sort of Gar­den of Eden where only good things hap­pen, this hap­pened. But it’s real life. Sadly. We woke up to minor may­hem, miss­ing things, fright­en­ing dirty hand­prints on the wall from one floor to another. They’d been all about, as we slept. NOT NICE. So that, the fall­out from that, poor John’s hav­ing to spend hours and hours can­celling credit cards, fill­ing out insur­ance forms, you name it, have all kept me from being in a blog­ging, shar­ing, self-expressing mood. We keep try­ing to tell our­selves: after 20 years of mar­ried life in major cities, if this is our first encounter with the crim­i­nal ele­ment, we must count our­selves lucky. If mute.

But I suf­fer when I don’t write. I feel all the warp and woof of our lives is lost if I don’t record it, appre­ci­ate it. And so a week of activ­ity, so much of it lovely and mem­o­rable, has gone by with­out my mak­ing it more than a breath drawn and let out.

So let’s see.

I’ve been play­ing piano like crazy, and I would heartily rec­om­mend your get­ting ahold of (great Mid­west­ern expres­sion, that) the score to our beloved “Band of Broth­ers”, it’s playable, emo­tional, sen­si­tive and com­fort­ing in times of stress. In fact, play­ing the piano at all has been some­thing I turn to when a recipe is not turn­ing out well, when a chap­ter is lag­ging behind my expec­ta­tions, when a mis­un­der­stand­ing with a friend has got me down. All else seems to iron itself out after a half hour or so at the piano.

Our neigh­bor­hood has acquired… a chicken! There is a dear lit­tle garden-obsessed boy whose gar­den is adja­cent to ours and who is quite inti­mately curi­ous about the run­ning of our lit­tle house­hold. “Where’s that girl who lives with you, and what are you hav­ing for din­ner?” are typ­i­cal open­ing con­ver­sa­tional salvos for lit­tle Andre. Well, over the week­end he turned up in the gap in our hedges say­ing, some­what unbe­liev­ably, “I have a chicken.” Surely not. “Surely not, Andre,” I said, and yet, there, barely vis­i­ble through the spread­ing branches of bam­boo, calla lily and what­ever else pro­vides the green­ery between our houses, was a flap­ping of brown wings. Andre promptly brought over an egg car­ton, con­tain­ing two lonely blue eggs. “She lays one every day,” he said proudly. So if you add up what it costs to buy the hen, the feed, the hen­house… each egg prob­a­bly costs about twice what it would to buy it in a posh shop full of such lovelies. Still, if she keeps Andre busy and less likely to scale our wall and enter our house unawares…

Last week found me in a com­pletely new spot: is it called West Acton? Or is it called Eal­ing? The tube sta­tion is Eal­ing Com­mon, so there’s a clue, but it’s a curi­ous ques­tion. And why do I care? Because my dear friend Janet was in from Santa Mon­ica, of course, and when­ever she comes to town, we food shop. Not con­tent with the nor­mal des­ti­na­tions like Chi­na­town or Lit­tle India, any­more, we felt we needed to go slightly more… shall we say, unknown? So we found our­selves some­how in West Acton. I met her off the tube sta­tion at Eal­ing Com­mon, and of course like any self-respecting Lon­doner, I had to ask parochially, “Don’t you miss Lon­don?” She didn’t skip a beat. “Of course I miss Lon­don! Peo­ple wear­ing gloves in June! Where else could I get that?” Fair enough.

We sloped along Sta­tion Parade Road, as it’s called, wait­ing for our sushi restau­rant to open, and as we waited, we came upon the bril­liant Cope Broth­ers fish­mon­ger, now Mo’s Fish­eries: a per­fectly old-fashioned shopfront fur­nished with mar­ble fit­tings the likes of which I have never seen: huge old coun­ter­tops, nicely angled and fit­ted with water sprays and drains into the floor, for the old days when the fishes were set out on piles of ice. Slightly dis­ap­point­ingly, but I’m sure very cleanly, the mod­ern fish peeked coyly from boxes of poly­styrene: sea bream and salmon were what I came away with, fab­u­lously fresh, fil­leted on the spot. I wish I could say I did some­thing exotic with them, but I didn’t. I took advan­tage of the unpar­al­leled fresh­ness and sim­ply pan-fried the bream (I’m a fanatic about debon­ing because if Avery finds a bone, that’s IT for din­ner), and grilled the salmon the next night. Go. You won’t find fresher fish unless you catch it your­self. And in unas­sum­ing West Acton!

From there we moseyed over to the lovely sort of catch-all food store Nat­ural Nat­ural for sear­ing wasabi paste, won­der­ful miso soup paste pack­ets for 20p, rice fla­vor­ing mix con­tain­ing every­thing but the kitchen sink. Lovely help­ful staff. I have since made that miso soup and can I tell you? Deli­ciously rich, no tofu. And the wasabi was wickedly HOT. Which I love.

Finally we sat down to lunch at Sushi-Hiro, a most unat­trac­tive restau­rant with a sin­gu­larly silent wait­ress who for some rea­son told us that we could have tuna rolls with pick­led radish but NOT, NOT with spring onion (I nearly offered to run to Nat­ural Nat­ural for some and come back), and while the menu said “no miso soup before din­ner,” she brought us some when we saw that other peo­ple had some. Hmm. But the fresh­est tuna belly you can imag­ine, and Janet adored the spicy chilli roe roll. Good on her, as they say, but no thank you. As usual we talked over and over each other, trad­ing sto­ries of life in New York, her new life in Cal­i­for­nia (don’t get her started on miss­ing Lon­don, gloves in June or not), Tacy who she fos­tered with­out being asked, when we shared a house in May­fair… a dear friend, is Janet, whose for­ays into Lon­don always make my heart sing.

I shall wait until I have slightly (slightly? a lot) more energy to tell you about our din­ner at Feng Sushi South­bank and the evening’s play, Phe­dre, on Sat­ur­day. I’d give each about a seven out of ten, which is why I’m not madly keen to spend the energy right now. But let me leave you with two recipes which have bright­ened the oth­er­wise dark last few days. One will see you through many dishes, if you can stom­ach it (I bet it can be frozen!), and the other screams sum­mer in Eng­land, and as such, is lovely.

All-Purpose Mush­room Stuff­ing
(make as much as you like but this serves four for the first pur­pose)

1/2 cup cubed pancetta or smoked ham
2 tbsps but­ter
10 medium mush­rooms, stems removed
2 shal­lots, minced
3 cloves gar­lic, minced
hand­ful fresh thyme leaves
1/2 cup goats cheese, crum­bled
hand­ful spinach leaves, chopped fine
fresh ground pep­per to taste
3 tbsps grated parme­san cheese

In a heavy skil­let, saute the pancetta till crisp then lift out with a slot­ted spoon and set aside.

Set aside 8 mush­rooms to stuff, then chop the final two plus all the stems.

Add but­ter to the pancetta fat in the skil­let, then fry the chopped mush­rooms, shal­lots and gar­lic and thyme leaves till soft. In a nice bowl, mix this with the goats cheese and chopped spinach, then pep­per well.

Line up the mush­rooms with­out stems in an aluminum-lined dish. Fill as high as you can with the mush­room mix­ture, then sprin­kle with cheese. Bake at 350F 280C for 20 minutes.

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Now comes the fun. Make a whole lot of this mix­ture: because here is what you can do with it: shove it gen­tly under the skin of a chicken and roast it, idea num­ber one. Num­ber two, fill red bell pep­pers with it and roast them for half an hour with a lit­tle olive oil driz­zled on top. Idea Num­ber Three, break sev­eral eggs, whisk them with a lit­tle cream, pour it into a skil­let and cook very gen­tly, then when the eggs are nearly cooked, spoon this mix­ture lightly onto the sur­face, turn over twice for the omelette of your LIFE. Fourth idea: slit a hole in a bone­less chicken breast, stuff some of the mix­ture in, close it up with tooth­picks and grill for four min­utes on each side on a hot grill.

There you go. At least FOUR, FIVE din­ners, easy.

And before I col­lapse with post-traumatic stress dis­or­der, I offer you:

Water­cress Pesto with Pis­ta­chios
(serves?? depends what you use it for)

2 cups lightly packed water­cress
1/2 cup roasted pis­ta­chios, shelled
2 cloves gar­lic
1/4 cup grated parme­san
juice of 1/2 lemon
olive oil till runny: 1/2 cup? depends on your taste

This recipe descended from my ran­dom mind: if one green leaf (basil) and one nut (pine nut) make pesto, which means in Ital­ian only “paste,” why not mess around with it? Whizz all the ingre­di­ents in your food proces­sor. DONE.

We ate this tonight tossed with grilled scal­lops and spaghetti, nice. You try your own ideas. Driz­zled over toma­toes and moz­zarella, that sounds good. Or on a fil­let of sea bass, or brushed over toasted bread. Yum yum…

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Right, I’m knack­ered, as they say. My blog­ging con­science is clear, except for “Phe­dre,” and you know what? I’m going to be lazy and say, it was fine, if you care about Athen­ian pol­i­tics and are remotely moved by a 62-year-old pro­fess­ing her love for her 22-year-old step­son. Helen Mir­ren did not walk on water, or per­form com­plex den­tistry with­out anaes­thetic, but she said her lines and emoted. Dominic Cooper was con­vinc­ingly hunky and gor­geous. The set looked, as another reviewer aptly noted, like Stil­ton cheese, and I am ashamed to say that once this was noted to me I could think noth­ing oth­er­wise. The play itself was Racine by way of Ted Hughes, and as such was a sort of watered-down (sorry, Ted!) French inten­sity. Beau­ti­fully cast, but the entire effort did not stir a heart­beat. Mir­ren seemed to be try­ing to con­vince us that she felt what she felt. Is that the script’s fault, or hers? But you go, and tell me where I got it wrong.

Mean­while, I’ll clean up a lit­tle more of the SOCO boys’ fin­ger­print detri­tus and count our­selves lucky that we lost only THINGS… I promise to be more cheer­ful next time.