Lovely Ladies Who Lunch and other adventures

A thought occurred to me in the mid­dle of the night: some­times I feel snow­balled, as in, run­ning in the trail of down­hill snow­ball, by events that come around only every few weeks or months, and then sud­denly, whoosh, they’re all there at once.

These things all hap­pened last week. Writ­ing class, with excel­lent advice given to me on piece now sub­mit­ted to the next issue of Vin­tage mag­a­zine. Bless the editor’s heart, to be inter­ested in, of all things, a piece that was Cam­panol­ogy born on my blog a year or so ago, on the art of bell-ringing. Some god­dess of edi­to­r­ial match-making must have been look­ing out for me, as this same lovely edi­tor wanted my “Recipe File” for the mag­a­zine last year. I know that there are writ­ers who com­plain about dead­lines, but so far, not me: a dead­line means some­one wants my work!

Com­ing home from writ­ing class I sat across from two men on the Tube: over­coats and shak­ing out news­pa­pers, decry­ing the state of mod­ern cul­ture and the fail­ure of “civil servants.”

“I say, old thing, most of them not the LEAST bit civil and most cer­tainly with no idea of how to be a servant!”

“Well, old boy, Churchill said some­thing very witty you know, about two peo­ples being sep­a­rated by a com­mon lan­guage, he had an Amer­i­can mother, you know, a Van­der­bilt or some such.”

“What we need, what this coun­try needs, is fewer small men mak­ing small mis­takes, and more GREAT men mak­ing GREAT mistakes.”

Com­ing from writ­ing class, all about char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, I felt I had been thrown into a Tube car thirty years ago with­out warn­ing, with men who might have served in the War, came home to rationing and too few ser­vants to look after one…

Then, you know, if it’s Jan­u­ary, it’s time for Avery’s sort of quar­terly hair­cut, only this time it seems to sit atop a per­son who is chang­ing right before our eyes: vin­tage Fer­reg­amo pumps from an antique shop in Con­necti­cut, sil­ver Gap tutu, blue-spotted tights, pink mohair sweater, Her­mes scarf pur­loined from me on her head, a gen­eral look of eccen­tric self­hood com­ing over her fea­tures. She’s always had an eye for fash­ion, even as a tod­dler crawl­ing around in a com­bi­na­tion of cor­duroy, silk and denim, pulling open the door to the dish­washer so she could sit on it, sur­vey­ing her world with skep­ti­cism and inter­est from that slight height. Then she would tod­dle over to the full-length mir­ror and look her­self up and down, maybe to return to her room and change her socks.

We got a very funny email from one of Avery’s teach­ers who hap­pened to come upon her singing Tom Lehrer’s “Chem­i­cal Ele­ments” for her chem­istry teacher… that com­bined with a very unusual fash­ion sense means we’re NEVER BORED.

Of course, every few months along comes the Lost Prop­erty lun­cheon, which means that I, plus 30 of the best vol­un­teers that Avery’s school has to offer, dust off our hands, fold up the moldy swim tow­els, dirty lacrosse sticks, smelly ten­nis train­ers, and gather together, in a pour­ing rain­storm, in my kitchen, to share gor­geous dishes of food. Ladies brought veg­etable lasagna (chock-ful of but­ter­nut squash, car­rots, egg­plant and mush­rooms), a salad of roast chicken, orzo, pine nuts, romaine let­tuce and parme­san shav­ings. My dear­est friend Annie brought her tiny meat­balls stuffed with moz­zarella, swim­ming in a sea of tomato sauce under a blan­ket of home­made bread­crumbs and cheese.

“Do you mind just get­ting this warmed up and grati­need, Kris­ten?” Annie men­tions, so I push the casse­role gen­tly into the oven and move onto var­i­ous other tasks, like gos­sip­ing. Finally I peek into the oven and it seems so SLOW, and noth­ing really bub­bling. Why not put it under the grill for a moment?

Sud­denly every­one seems to be cough­ing. “Open the gar­den door!” I shout, as my heart sinks and I open the oven door. Bread­crumbs black­ened. The smoke alarm goes off.

“Is this just browned and tasty, or… car­cino­genic?” Annie asks, scrap­ing it off, the best of all pos­si­ble sports.

Ah well, the after­noon was lovely any­way. Some­one brought quite sim­ply the best cheese EVER, some­thing called Wig­more from Jeroboam’s in Hol­land Park Avenue. Slightly smelly, creamy, melt­ingly rich. And a rhubarb tart, and a trea­cle tart with fresh whipped cream, a plate of Lebanese treats of honey and pis­ta­chios and pastry.

We all pitch in to tidy up a bit so Annie can give me a lift to school — I’m car­ry­ing a plate of left­over tart for Jamie and Avery to snack on! — , and then I pick them up at the gate, carry their clob­ber over to Jamie’s mother’s car where we pile in to head to the skat­ing rink, every­one shar­ing the tart.

“I’ll carry it in to the skat­ing rink,” Avery offers, “hid­den like this beneath my sweater.”

“Stick it in my skate bag!” Jamie shrieks, but Avery insists.

“No, between my two files it will be fine,” and we sneak in, with our for­bid­den out­side snack included.

Sat­ur­day we suc­cumb to that other sort of quar­terly impulse: Cam­den Mar­ket. Nor­mally, of course, noth­ing could drag John to a place that man­ages to be both cold and stuffy, windy and full of cig­a­rette smoke, and con­tain­ing nearly all the peo­ple in Lon­don between the ages of 17–28. All in search of a dress from the 1960s and a pair of go-go boots, for an upcom­ing party given by one of Avery’s friends. I say “nor­mally,” because in fact John will do a lot of things he won’t nor­mally do, in order to help Avery out.

Poly­ester dresses by the YARD, stink­ing of the ages, all the shops play­ing the Bee-Gees but not quite synched up, so you end up hear­ing bits of “Stayin’ Alive” six­teen shops in a row. All the shop girls con­vinc­ing Avery that each dress is the one she needs, and also that she really CAN walk in knee-high (someone’s knee, some­one John’s height) boots with plat­form, or stiletto heels. Finally we ran a dress to earth: pur­ple, green, orange and blue rayon, with white col­lar, tie and cuffs, knee-high, and plas­tic jew­elry to match. But no go-go boots. Not yet.

From the Mar­ket in a rush across town and across Pic­cadilly to the the­atre dis­trict where we were to see a play and have sushi before, but it became clear with traf­fic that we wouldn’t make it to sushi. That sort of semi-silent treat­ment between mar­ried peo­ple ensued. No one wanted either to blame the other or com­pletely sup­port the other, so we sim­ply fumed slightly and then arrived at the the­atre, picked up the tick­ets and real­ized we had an hour. Not quite sushi time, but time for something.

“What are you in the mood for, Avery?” Pre­dictably, Ital­ian. But huge queues.

“Would you rather run for sushi, or try this Korean place?”

“You guys aren’t lik­ing each other too much right now, so I’m not get­ting involved!” she wisely decides, so Jin­dalle Korean Grill it was, and actu­ally, very good it was, although we were rushed. The place was vir­tu­ally next-door to the the­atre, so we could relax and enjoy grilled beef, duck, pork and chicken, while I wished for some sort of carb and we looked at our watches.

Finally, one of those clas­sic things I seem to sched­ule for us to do once every few weeks and then suf­fer ago­nies of pres­sure as to whether or not every­one will enjoy it: the­atre tick­ets. Last night it was “The Mis­an­thrope” with Damian Lewis and Keira Knight­ley, and it was a total joy. Amaz­ing rhyming schemes, ener­getic per­for­mances, very pointed social com­men­tary set in con­tem­po­rary life, but with recur­ring hilar­i­ous ref­er­ences to 17th cen­tury France. And some very funny lines… one from a celebrity play­wright to a failed writer… “What do you mean, you’re going to MAKE a scene? You can’t even WRITE one!”

Home chat­ter­ing about the dia­logue (how much did Avery mind a lot of curs­ing? not much: “I hear a lot worse at school, from TEACH­ERS!”), the cos­tumes at the party in the last scene of the play, how well Keira pulled off an Amer­i­can accent (pretty well). Tired on a Sat­ur­day night, from the bits of adven­ture that seems to keep us busy.

As for cook­ing, I can tell you that one of the favorite dishes at the Lost Prop­erty lun­cheon was my own:

Crunchy Col­or­ful Slaw
(serves at last 8 as a side dish)

1/2 head each shred­ded: red cab­bage, white cab­bage, Savoy cab­bage
3 large car­rots, julienned

dress­ing: equal parts lemon juice, bal­samic vine­gar, Dijon mus­tard, fro­mage frais or yogurt
1 tbsp may­on­naise
1/2 tsp dried oregano
sea salt to taste

Sim­ply shake up the dress­ing in a jar, then toss every­thing together.

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This slaw went beau­ti­fully with all the lasagne and meat­balls, and my roasted salmon.

But prob­a­bly the most pop­u­lar side dish was this invented by my friend Eliz­a­beth:

Orzo Chicken Salad
(serves at least 8 as a side dish)

4 chicken breasts with skin on
Orzo – half a pack
Cos (but­ter or Boston, in Amer­ica) let­tuce – chopped into small pieces
Other mixed leaves includ­ing rocket
Aspara­gus tips
Pack of pine nuts (about 1 cup)
Block of parme­san
Flat leaf pars­ley — bunch

Vinai­grette
4 table­spoons olive oil
2 table­spoons white wine vine­gar
2 tea­spoons dry mus­tard
Mal­don salt to taste

Roast the chicken breasts, cool, remove skin, and slice thinly. Set aside.
Mean­while, boil water for the orzo and cook for 15 min­utes and drain. Cool but make sure that you add olive oil so that the pasta does not stick.

Roast the pine nuts briefly – make sure they do not burn. Set aside.

Boil salted water for aspara­gus and cook for 5 min­utes. Drain and cool.

Put the orzo in a large salad bowl and stir in the let­tuce and rocket. Add the chicken and mix in. Mix in the vinai­grette and add the aspara­gus and pine nuts, cov­er­ing all the ingre­di­ents with vinaigrette.

Sprin­kle shav­ings of parme­san and chopped pars­ley on top, add Mal­don salt to taste, stir again, and serve.

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This week? Quiet. Peace­ful. Unevent­ful. At least that’s the plan, but then… it’s only Sun­day night. Watch this space.