oooff

Have we done noth­ing but eat for the past three days? No, we’ve also talked until you’d think we would run out of words. By a coin­ci­dence of social plan­ning, we have had lunch out, din­ner party, lunch out, din­ner party and if I don’t stir any­thing or chew any­thing for the fore­see­able future it will be too soon.

No, that’s not even slightly true! In between exten­sive real estate vis­its try­ing des­per­ately to find a house that doesn’t come com­plete with divorce papers (can you tell we don’t agree on what makes a per­fect house? I thought so), and fer­ry­ing Avery to rid­ing, and read­ing to my lit­tle school sprouts, we have been like peo­ple who are get­ting ready to move to another planet: we must see every­one we know before we go! Per­haps this week will be qui­eter, but then I’ll be bored. And all this fol­low­ing on the heels of our whirl­wind tour of New York and Con­necti­cut has me quite befuddled.

It all started with my long-awaited lunch with Susan on Fri­day, at Fish­works where I had such a nice lunch a year ago, all by myself. How times have changed! Since we had not seen each other in weeks and weeks, we had a lot of ground to cover in just a cou­ple of hours. Every time I see Susan I am reminded that she has a much more col­or­ful life than I have! Her fam­ily sim­ply bursts with drama, her past with famous col­lege room­mates and next-door neigh­bors who write tell-all thinly-disguised mem­oirs about their unfor­tu­nate fam­ily mem­bers, and now, it appears, a long-lost Pol­ish great-uncle who has a por­trait of Susan’s grand­mother, lan­guish­ing in his stu­dio. At least, it was lan­guish­ing. Now it has made its mys­te­ri­ous way to Man­ches­ter, in the hands of another Pol­ish rela­tion, who is meet­ing with Susan today to try to get her to take it off his hands. “But I don’t want it! My brother doesn’t want it! My mother doesn’t want it. Where will I put it?” Susan wails. She has prob­lems. I can’t wait to see it.

So I had an absolutely deli­ciously fresh whole sea bass, roasted with whole stems of rose­mary tucked into the flesh, and with lots of crunchy sea salt cling­ing to it. Plus sauteed spinach with gar­lic and but­ter. So lux­u­ri­ous. And we didn’t get through half what we needed to talk about, although Avery’s Eng­lish teacher got a thor­ough air­ing. When I called a meet­ing to dis­cuss Avery’s… treat­ment in Eng­lish class, I was all but called an aggres­sive, per­fec­tion­ist Amer­i­can mother who can’t bear to see her child crit­i­cised. Well. Fair enough. But I hate to see this teacher pull off the impos­si­ble: turn a child whose great­est love is read­ing and writ­ing into some­one afraid to turn in her home­work. It just is not help­ful. Susan and I agreed, how­ever, that actual draw­ing and quar­ter­ing was not an option. Yet.

From there, it was a dash to make school pickup, and hand her to Becky for the after­noon of bliss­ful play that was planned at Anna’s house. How pathetic am I to go to pickup even when I don’t need to? But I do like to see her lit­tle face. It warmed my heart so much to hear Becky refer to her as “Fifi,” since only peo­ple who really love her do that. Then I was on to Sel­f­ridges to try to track down some beef ribs. No joy. Upon hear­ing the word “rib” the butcher insisted that I wanted a joint. No, ribs in the plural, please? How about a veal joint? No, I really want beef ribs. Appar­ently they don’t do that here. I would say I was just using the wrong ter­mi­nol­ogy, all too easy to do in this land of the spu­ri­ous shared lan­guage. But I didn’t see any­thing in the case resem­bling ribs. So I caved and bought pork spareribs, always lovely, but not what I wanted to braise in tomato sauce in a vain attempt to match Olimpia’s per­fect dish. And I don’t think I can bring any back from Amer­ica. Hmmm, more research needed obviously.

In any case, home I went to slather the ribs with honey and sea salt and put them in a slow oven (350, I’d say, or 180 here) for three hours, turn­ing often and bast­ing. Doesn’t get any bet­ter than that. Just as they were get­ting ten­der, in trooped the McBs for our cel­e­bra­tory “Highly-Skilled Migrant Worker and His Depen­dents” din­ner. It’s not a hol­i­day every­one observes, but for our fam­ily it was quite sig­nif­i­cant, since the McBs hap­pily don’t show any signs of going “home” either. They came bear­ing gifts: Erin’s spe­cial two ver­sions of sticky tof­fee pud­ding, com­plete with tof­fee sauce to heat up and pour over. By the time we had got through the ribs, an enor­mous dish of mac­a­roni and cheese, a gigan­tic bowl of car­rots caramelised in but­ter and brown sugar, it was hard to look upon the pud­dings with the favor they deserved, but… we man­aged. And so began the process of far too much food that con­tin­ued into…

Lun­cheon with Vin­cent. Yes, as if he hasn’t been gen­er­ous enough with his menus, and then on Thurs­day his pho­to­graphic skills, he invited us once again, this time to give John a chance to see the con­tact sheets from the photo shoot. Was there ever a bet­ter lunch? I don’t hope ever to have one. And best of all, it put both Avery and John back on salmon, which I con­sider tan­ta­mount to an act of God. It will be won­der­ful to be able to bring that fish back into my kitchen, in an unsmoked form. Vincent’s ver­sion was softly poached in the oven, smoth­ered in a layer of finely juli­enned veg­eta­bles: red pep­pers, car­rots, fen­nel, and served with a creamy sauce con­tain­ing more of the veg­eta­bles. As soon as I get the actual recipe, I promise to share. With this was steamed broc­coli (or rather, it was braised, as I saw Pete stir­ring it in a skil­let) with lemon and olive oil, sliced boiled pota­toes, oh heaven. We sim­ply ate our­selves silly. Then of course there was salad! With a new thing I had never had before, beet­root sprouts. Spicy, crunchy, del­i­cate. Def­i­nitely some­thing to add. And THEN… the cheese­board. Fully seven, eight cheeses? I lost count. A barely-there goats cheese, ter­ri­bly young and del­i­cate, a per­fect Stil­ton, oh, I don’t know. So good, with a hearty brown bread and oat­cakes. And red and green grapes. And THEN… pud­ding. The sim­plest apri­cot tart you can imag­ine, just a per­fect short crust and halved apri­cots, with a sugar syrup poured over. I saw him do this, so I can attest that even those of us who think we can’t bake could do it.

Why isn’t Vin­cent writ­ing his own cook­book? Or start easy and do… a blog. Why not? Clearly any­one can. He is the real thing when it comes to cook­ing, where I am shown up as a bit of a fraud, but I don’t mind as long as he feeds me. He truly does put a load of flour and a load of sugar and some but­ter in a Mag­imix and whizz it and… there’s pas­try for a tart. Even his salad dress­ings are spec­tac­u­lar. And through it all he’s the most ener­getic father to his two beau­ti­ful lit­tle girls, who greatly enjoyed look­ing over the con­tact sheets with Avery (pos­si­bly her first ecounter with a loupe?). And Pete is the per­fect foil for Vin­cent: where Vin­cent is mer­cu­r­ial, unpre­dictable, Pete is all appre­ci­a­tion, con­san­guin­ity, firm dis­ci­pline of the girls while tick­ling them. And he is not with­out his own culi­nary mas­ter­pieces: upon hear­ing that John liked cheese­cake, out one came from the fridge, of Pete’s own design, and would you believe that John ate it? I con­fess I had two bites. Divinely cold and limey.

And I can say about the pho­tographs only this: if you ever have the chance for a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher who loves you to take your pic­ture, DO IT. While I will never love look­ing at a pic­ture of myself, I came closer than I ever thought I would. Thank you, Vincent.

I must go have din­ner (! I know what I just said! but the stom­ach knows no rea­son), but I will tempt you with this pho­to­graph of Avery and one of her old school chums from New York, who came over last night… for din­ner. I know, I know…