Wales redux

Well, my cele­riac soup is on the cooker for lunch and I’m kick­ing up my heels for 15 min­utes or so, so here I am. With an amaz­ing story to tell, as it turns out. It starts out very sad, but ends up quite miraculous.

Yes­ter­day was, sadly, the first anniver­sary of my dar­ling father in law’s diag­no­sis with can­cer. I felt the day approach­ing and knew it would be a hard one for every­one, espe­cially my mother in law who has aban­doned us and gone back to Iowa. Would that she could have stayed for­ever! But dur­ing our week in Wales, one day she was prepar­ing for bed and real­ized that her pre­cious gold link bracelet, nearly a twin to mine and a gift from John’s dad, had dis­ap­peared. We spent all the next day retrac­ing our steps from shop to shop in Lan­gollen and Cor­wen, and report­ing the loss to the police. So sad! It seemed ter­ri­bly hard to have it gone, and although it was insured and Rose­mary had every plan to replace it, it would not have been the same as the orig­i­nal gift from Jack. Much distress.

Well, yes­ter­day we were all feel­ing down and pre­oc­cu­pied and not quite our­selves, when the phone rang near bed­time. It was Rose­mary. “You will not believe this, but I found the bracelet, in the bot­tom of my hand­bag. I had looked, of course, but there it was, under the pile of pens and pen­cils I seem to keep there.” There was a won­der­ful lilt in her voice, such a sense of relief. On the anniver­sary. It’s hard not to believe that some­one some­where decided the loss was just too much, and… put it back. Even my Orig­i­nal Skep­tic Hus­band has suc­cumbed to this feel­ing! How lovely.

Let’s see, I myself reread my Wales post and it made me ter­ri­bly home­sick to go back. There was some­thing quite mag­i­cal about the week: so removed from all the cares of nor­mal life like sched­ules and back­packs and exams. We stayed in a lit­tle 14th cen­tury house called Plas Uchaf, a place John and I had stayed many years ago as new­ly­weds with our adored cat Chelsea. We briefly con­tem­plated tak­ing Tacy, but decided that the pos­si­bil­ity of her get­ting out and being lost was too much. So it was a cat­less week, but other than that there were no com­plaints. When I describe it to you it will sound like some exer­cise in self-denial: no sig­nif­i­cant sources of heat, no tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, or com­puter obvi­ously, and for sev­eral days no hot water in the kitchen tap so that all the washing-up water had to be car­ried from the bath­tub (which itself did not yield any excit­ing quan­ti­ties of the pre­cious sub­stance, I can tell you: hip-baths!). O Pio­neer! But for all that, it was absolutely idyllic.

From the evening we arrived, fresh (or not) from a very long drive com­pli­cated by a wreck on the M1, we all breathed a sigh of relax­ation. I had brought along an enor­mous dish of mac­a­roni and cheese, shades of our Exmoor adven­ture for Avery’s birth­day. The per­fect thing to pop in the oven upon arrival, unpack a bit of lug­gage, and there was din­ner. There’s noth­ing like the smell of bub­bling cheese to make every­one feel at home! And what a home! Rose­mary and Avery headed imme­di­ately upstairs to find their bed­room: a mar­vel of antique fur­ni­ture and rugs, with two lit­tle ver­ti­cal win­dows look­ing down into the Great Hall. John imme­di­ately com­man­deered the enor­mous fire­place and from then on was the Com­pleat Pyro­ma­niac, obsess­ing over coals, starter sticks, logs of every shape and size. “This batch of logs is damp,” he would say bit­terly, bran­dish­ing a hap­less chunk. “They shouldn’t sell damp wood.” All after­noon he would tend his fire, so that we could eat in the FREEZ­ING Great Hall, watch­ing our breath in lit­tle white gusts, and then imme­di­ately hud­dle around the fire before bedtime.

To sit in bed after a long day walk­ing and shop­ping and cook­ing and explor­ing, and lis­ten to the hum of Avery’s and Rosemary’s voices across the land­ing, chuck­ling and chat­ting, was inde­scrib­ably cozy! After so many weeks and months of fret­ting that we could not take care of her, or just look her in the eye and see how she was doing, it was absolute heaven just to hear her laugh and peek in at them in their twin beds, tucked up with hot water bot­tles, read­ing the piles of Log Books that all Land­mark Trust houses boast: everyone’s accounts of their stays from past years! We even found my orig­i­nal log from 1991! Amazing.

Food shop­ping! I think we patro­n­ised every sin­gle food-purveying estab­lish­ment in a 30-mile radius. If you find your­self in North Wales, high­tail it to the Rhug Farm Shop just out­side Cor­wen and get some of the mirac­u­lous lamb, gar­lic and rose­mary pate from Cot­tage Delight. Lovely for a pic­nic sand­wich! Or even at mid­night on a piece of toast, truth be told.

The sweet lit­tle fruit and veg shop in Cor­wen became our local mecca: new own­ers, very anx­ious to please and, I think, slightly curi­ous about these Amer­i­can vis­i­tors who seemed to do noth­ing but buy fruit and veg! Try­ing to branch out a bit from our con­stant round of broc­coli, red pep­pers, beet­root, spinach and aspara­gus, I tried a nice cour­gette recipe that, while it didn’t make Avery sit up and beg, she ate. Warn­ing: you have to like garlic.

Baked Cour­gettes with Gar­lic and Cheese
(serves four)

3 nice skinny cour­gettes
4 cloves gar­lic, minced
2 tbsps olive oil
1 tbsp sin­gle cream
1/2 cup grated Ched­dar or other strong cheese

Slice the cour­gettes nice and thin and layer them in a small glass bak­ing dish. Sprin­kle with the gar­lic and driz­zle with the oil and cream. Scat­ter the cheese across the top and bake in a medium oven for about 30 min­utes or until cheese is nice and bubbly.

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This is nice because the cour­gettes keep a lit­tle bit of a bite, and the olive oil is velvety.

Let’s see, dur­ing the week we dis­cov­ered that Avery has an irra­tional fear of walk­ing DOWN hills. I’ve always known her to freak out slight at the top of very steep esca­la­tors, but this time, we were embark­ing on a huge hill just out­side a gor­geous area called Horse­shoe Pass, a val­ley filled with impos­si­ble mist, dot­ted with sheep and the occa­sional house. Avery got UP the hill with no prob­lem, leav­ing us elderly adults puff­ing in her wake. But then we all reached the top and stopped to admire the view, and she absolutely lost it. Nearly in tears, poor gull. Rose­mary taught her to walk diag­o­nally, but even so, she was just ter­ri­fied. Occa­sion­ally she left the path and clung to a scrubby lit­tle bush, try­ing not to cry. We felt so bad for her! Once we got to the bot­tom we dis­cussed the nature of irra­tional fears (namely, they’re irra­tional so peo­ple who don’t share them should stop try­ing to talk you out of them). I thought some of my old fear-of-flying tech­niques might help, like con­tin­u­ing to do the thing and mak­ing your­self notice that noth­ing bad is hap­pen­ing. So the rest of the hol­i­day we spent march­ing her up and down big hills, and I must say she got much bet­ter. Good old cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­apy at work.

But what really brought her out of her funk that par­tic­u­lar day was the sight of a large and very dirty sheep, stand­ing stock­still in the mid­dle of the road. “It’s escaped from its field!” Avery shouted. “We must save it!” So John drove ahead to try to block it, and we saw at the end of a field a gate and thought we might herd the thing toward the gate and let it in. Of course the sheep had other ideas and scut­tled down a lit­tle lane, toward some com­pa­tri­ots in another field. “We should tell the farmer he’s out,” I said help­fully, so John drove down an even smaller lane toward a house we could see in the dis­tance. As we did so, we noticed a cat­tle grid. “You know what,” John said, “That sheep’s not lost. All these sheep are MEANT to be over here. I can’t believe we are such city idiots that we thought we needed to SAVE that sheep.” So he began to back down the lane, until I sug­gested he turn around and go out straight. Sadly, my sense of where the back of the car was could not be trusted, and to Avery’s dis­may we nearly went through a very rick­ety fence and top­pled off a precipice into obliv­ion. “We’re going to die!” she shrieked, and “I’m get­ting out of this car.” So she hopped out, and I hopped out to try to give some direc­tion, but the back wheels were stuck in mud and the car was STRANDED.

Sud­denly, from up another lane came not one, not two or three, but FOUR sturdy off-road Jeep-like trucks, and out popped four strap­ping young men, shout­ing, “Do you need help?” They just hap­pened to be a Sat­ur­day club of off-road ram­blers, and there they were in the nick of time, to save us. One of the men clev­erly dis­cov­ered a winchy thing in the front of the car, and pro­duced a stout rope from his, and before we knew it, he was dri­ving ahead and the protest­ing rental car was saved. We were clearly the biggest for­eign idiots that the whole group had seen in some time, and the wives were not too sub­tly whip­ping out their mobile phones and tak­ing pic­tures of us. “BRITAIN RES­CUES AMER­ICA!” one man laughed, and his wife asked, “So how long have you been here?” and John, think­ing she meant “here in Britain,” answered, “Oh, about two years.” Burst of laugh­ter from all the ram­blers, and another wife asked, “What, HERE, stranded, for two years?” Then we all laughed and I said we some­times sent out for sand­wiches and it hadn’t been that bad.

And off they went! With a story to dine out on for weeks, no doubt.

That night we found our­selves with all food stores closed on our way home, and I had to think strateget­i­cally (my favourite Avery word of all time, along with “smallen”) about what to pro­duce from what I already had. What I came up with was a pretty good dish if you’re on a diet. It con­tained, amaz­ingly for me, no but­ter, no cream, no cheese. Give it a try if you’re feel­ing virtuous.

Miso Mar­i­nated Chicken With Aspara­gus and Mush­rooms
(serves four)

1 packet instant miso soup pow­der
juice of 1 lime
4 chicken breast fil­lets, cut in chunks
2 tbsps olive oil
4 cloves gar­lic, minced
1 bunch aspara­gus, cut into bite-size pieces
1 lb but­ton mush­rooms, quartered

Mix the miso with the lime juice and stir to a paste. Pour over the chicken breasts chunks in a medium bowl and stir well to coat. Set aside. Heat the oil in a skil­let and saute the aspara­gus and mush­rooms until the aspara­gus is bright green and the mush­rooms soft. Remove and set aside, leav­ing the oil behind as well as the mush­room liq­uid. Saute the chicken in the same skil­let, and when it’s done, toss in the veg­eta­bles, stir­ring until they are heated through again. Pretty good! Serve with steamed bas­mati rice.

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I’ll never for­get the cozi­ness of sit­ting by the fire chat­ting with John while Rose­mary and Avery set­tled them­selves in their room, and look­ing up to their lighted lit­tle win­dows to see them wav­ing at us and mak­ing faces. Avery invented a crazy voice in which to say “Hello,” and we all began using it, “Hello? Hello!” And we played end­less, pos­i­tively end­less games of soli­taire, and dou­ble soli­taire, Avery and her grand­mother play­ing for hours at the kitchen table while I cooked. And Avery recited the entirety of “The Lady of Shalott” for us in a com­pletely absurd, fruity Eng­lish accent: “On either side the river lie long fields of bar­ley and of rye,” mak­ing Rose­mary and me laugh until we cried, rolling her Rs and her eyes and milk­ing it for all she was worth. She made Lady Brack­nell look relaxed and down to earth. Too, too funny. And one evening John went out to the back gar­den to throw cof­fee grounds over the fence, to find two sheep with tiny lambs! Avery and I pur­sued them in a gen­tle sort of way, but to no avail. That would have been too perfect.

Well, I think that was our Wales adven­ture. Oh, and a dar­ling lit­tle vil­lage called Llan­r­wst, no idea how you pro­nounce that with no use­ful vow­els, but pos­sess­ing a won­der­ful shop called Berry, filled with old books. I bought beau­ti­ful copies of lots of clas­sics that I’ve never had time to read, like “Mans­field Park” and “The Scar­let Pim­per­nel,” for Avery to have on our shelves, and the entire huge back of books was 12 pounds! If you find your­self there, do go in.

Sadly we had to come home, although frankly my mother in law makes Lon­don so much fun it wasn’t a tragedy to have the hol­i­day end. We went to the Tate Mod­ern to see the mag­nif­i­cent Doris Sal­cedo instal­la­tion: a long, long crack in the cement floor, wide enough in some places to lose a foot, nar­row as a piece of yarn in oth­ers. Really impres­sive! And a Juan Munoz exhi­bi­tion of fig­u­ra­tive work that is not my cup of tea, but made Rose­mary really happy. And we went to Por­to­bello Road, and the National Por­trait Gallery, and shop­ping for food at Sel­f­ridges and the farmer’s mar­ket, and out to din­ner at the glo­ri­ous “Star of India,” truly the best Indian food in Lon­don, I believe. A starter that you must try: light as a feather kadek jhinga, prawns in a saf­fron bat­ter, with tamarind chut­ney. Gor­geous! And a chicken dish that made Avery’s heart sing, she who eat mush­rooms in any form, murg khumb bahar, a breast stuffed with chopped mush­rooms and onions, mar­i­nated with yogurt cream and swim­ming in a sauce of wild mush­rooms and cashews. Sim­ply superb. And so nice to have a night off cooking!

Well, it’s John’s birth­day today and I am suc­cumb­ing to some­thing I nor­mally would rather walk across hot coals than pro­duce: tuna casse­role. The notion of tinned tuna served HOT is to me like heat­ing up a can of cat food. Urgh. But every year on his birth­day he asks, and every year I say no. The one year I actu­ally agreed to make it, I turned out to dis­cover I was expect­ing Avery: right on his birth­day! Isn’t that amaz­ing. So I thought, oh, go all out and make that awful dish as well. But I was so dis­tracted by being five min­utes preg­nant that I for­got to cook the noo­dles ahead of time, and just threw them in with the hideous tinned tuna and mush­room soup. The result was some­thing with a, how shall I put it, unique con­sis­tency. Nei­ther wet nor solid, with odd crunchy bits that threat­ened to break one’s teeth off, and over­all a per­va­sive odor of… cat food. Ah well, I’ve learned since then. Noth­ing on earth could make me actu­ally eat it, but tonight’s ver­sion will be made with gourmet yel­low­tail sus­pended in extra vir­gin olive oil, organic cel­ery, home­made mush­room soup and the best Ital­ian noo­dles. COOKED. Happy Birth­day, John!