half-term

I’m busy in the kitchen this sunny Lon­don morn­ing, prepar­ing for a lit­tle din­ner party tonight — my father’s first cousin is vis­it­ing! — at which I’ll serve the nation’s favorite dish.  Curry!  Next week will see Hin­dus cel­e­brat­ing Diwali, the fes­ti­val of lights, and for that rea­son all the telly chefs seem to be com­ing for­ward with their var­i­ous ver­sions of the clas­sic Indian treat.  What Amer­i­cans may find funny is that British “curry” often does not fea­ture… curry pow­der!  Curry pow­der itself is, of course, an amal­gam of many spices includ­ing turmeric, corian­der, cumin and cin­na­mon.  British cur­ries, includ­ing the one I’m mak­ing tonight, fea­ture a paste of lemon grass, chilli, gin­ger, gar­lic and oil.  I’ll start with that and then add spices as I go along.

If you can imag­ine, Avery is on school hol­i­day this week and next!  How on earth, we might well be tempted to ask, can a school sys­tem be ready for a hol­i­day just six weeks after the begin­ning of term?  Until I became the mother of essen­tially a British teenager you could never have con­vinced me that any­one could need a break in Octo­ber.  But we all do!  This par­tic­u­lar year, when Avery and her mates are buck­ling down to what are called GCSEs (the first really impor­tant exams that will occur next year, after which chil­dren can legally leave school).  Home­work lev­els have spiked and there is real pres­sure to pro­duce seri­ous work in sev­eral lan­guages, three sci­ences and (tough­est of all, to my mind) math­e­mat­ics that I can no longer even pre­tend to understand.

Added to this onslaught of work are the rehearsals for “Sweet Char­ity,” the musi­cal Avery will be in next month.  As the days grow shorter and colder, Avery seems to come home later and later, laden with books and files, starv­ing to death, and with a huge work­load before we can hope to sit down to din­ner.  It was a nice break last week to head over to Kingston to hear the Down­ton Abbey cre­ator Julian Fel­lowes talk about his career, the stratos­pheric suc­cess of DA, his future plans — a series about the Titanic next year!

He was sim­ply adorable!  For all the accu­sa­tions that he is a snob, that “Down­ton Abbey” is a snob­bish pro­gramme, I have to admit that I love it all.  I do think it’s a funny con­tra­dic­tion, Amer­i­cans’ atti­tude toward any­thing resem­bling the British aris­toc­racy.  We may well have fled Eng­land our­selves all those years ago seek­ing greater equal­ity and free­dom, but we love noth­ing more than Hello! mag­a­zine, the Royal Wed­ding, and any­one addressed as Count­ess or Lady.  So I enjoyed greatly sit­ting on the dusty floor of the Rose The­atre in the round, and lis­ten­ing to the plummy tones of Mr Fel­lowes describ­ing his life as a drama stu­dent, some 40 years ago.  “We found our­selves between the bril­liance of John Cleese and Monty Python before us, and Hugh Lau­rie and Stephen Fry who came after us.  In short, we were the bread between the jam, as it were.”

“Act­ing is like play­ing ten­nis,” he pon­tif­i­cated.  “You should always pur­sue each activ­ity with peo­ple who are bet­ter at it than YOU.”

Oh, speak­ing of ten­nis, we have had to admit that very shortly, the courts will be too damp, leafy and dan­ger­ous for us to play.  And so we have taken up a new and totally crazy sport: SQUASH.  One les­son at the Barnes Squash Club has con­vinced at least John that we should pur­sue this, so I’m going along with it.

I can under­stand that if I am going to con­tinue to cook for us, we have to find ever more clever ways of burn­ing off all the calo­ries.  But I have to admit I think I’ll always feel more com­fort­able with the sort of squash that takes but­ter and sage and gets pureed with a hand blender.

Roasted But­ter­nut Squash Soup

(serves 4)

1 large but­ter­nut squash

2 tbsps butter

6 leaves fresh sage

500 ml/2 cups chicken stock

driz­zle sin­gle cream

Cut the squash in half length­wise and dot with but­ter and sage leaves.  Roast at 220C/425F for about half an hour or until fully cooked and soft.  Scoop squash into a saucepan and cover with chicken stock.  Sim­mer for five min­utes, then puree with hand blender.  Pour into warm bowls and driz­zle with cream.

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One of the biggest treats of this autumn has been our trip to Bor­ough Mar­ket.  It’s the way John gets me to accom­pany him on his real-estate for­ays into the East-ish End of Lon­don: the lure of every deli­cious food­stuff you can dream up, under one cor­ru­gated metal roof, high above our heads.  Stalls of pump­kins (speak­ing of squash!)…

And figs, a dis­play of which would bring my mother in law to tears.

But per­haps my favorite stall of all is Gas­tro­nom­ica, that famed Ital­ian seller of all things char­cu­terie (what’s Ital­ian for “char­cu­terie,” any­way?), dairy, cheese… and the best but­ter on the face of the earth.

I brought home a head of cau­li­flower to roast whole, and WHAT a good idea that was.  Sim­ply driz­zled with lots of olive oil and sprin­kled with a good sea salt, roasted in a hot oven for 30 minutes.

For­ti­fied by my cau­li­flower, I’ve been a good girl and done my “pool duty” at Avery’s school, a termly oblig­a­tion which entails pick­ing up the keys to the fab­u­lous old struc­ture at a house nearby, cycling through the autumn leaves over to school, open­ing up the box with its money to pay the life­guard, ask­ing mem­bers to sign in, then breath­ing in the steamy air for an hour and a half while swim­mers trun­dle up and down.  One man came in from the chilly out­side to greet me and the life­guard, who pum­meled him with ques­tions about the foot­ball match going on: Wales — vs– France.  “I can’t believe you’re root­ing for Wales, sir,” said the life­guard.  “Well, nor­mally of course I wouldn’t.  But they’re play­ing FRANCE.”  The lesser of two evils, to the Eng­lish mindset.

On Sun­day we all awoke to a foggy day which I spent mak­ing every mis­take in bell­ring­ing that it is pos­si­ble to make.  I led with the tre­ble very badly, finally learn­ing to fol­low the tenor.  It’s a nice les­son in life: to be the leader, some­times it’s nec­es­sary only to fol­low who seems to be last.  Then it was onto Chiswick where when asked to “ring down” the tre­ble bell, I acci­den­tally pulled it down in two strokes.  Was there ever a scarier moment?  “You got away with that because it was the tre­ble, a tiny bell,” Matt said.  “If you’d had a heavy bell you’d be miss­ing a hand right now.”

And this is my new hobby.  How do I get myself into these situations?

The only way to recover was with a lovely plate of lemon sole, sauteed in olive oil and topped with a dust­ing of crispy Fox Point bread­crumbs.  Ter­ri­bly suc­cess­ful to taste, but not pretty enough to pho­to­graph.  On the other hand, the side dish of juli­enned beet­root, shaped into a cake and fried in duck fat, was beau­ti­ful, with its dol­lop of sour cream.

It turns out that while juli­enned pota­toes will form a cake, beet­root will not.  And beet­root with duck fat is sim­ply gild­ing the lily, as it were.  Cook­ing is not always suc­cess­ful if you make experiments.

Avery’s been exper­i­ment­ing this break, but not with beet­root.  First she spent a day in Tot­ten­ham with her fash­ion designer men­tor Stephane St Jaymes, the bril­liant man who offered her a “Take Your Daugh­ter To Work” day last spring.  I love the out­fit she chose for her day with him this week.

I dropped her off at a photographer’s house yes­ter­day so she could be part of a shoot called “hair before and after,” and look what came home!

 So tomor­row, with her new hair­cut and ready for an adven­ture, we are off on the Eurostar to Paris for an early cel­e­bra­tion of Avery’s birth­day.  More from there!