back with a flourish

I’m just hap­py to have the blog back. Some of you (the hun­dreds who emailed me, per­haps, among them?) may have noticed my hia­tus these last few days. Let me explain.

A new read­er to the blog, who hap­pened upon it through an entire­ly acci­den­tal group of key­words in a search engine, expressed in no uncer­tain terms that there was FAR too much trans­paren­cy, I think they call it, in my use of, say, real peo­ple. Real places, real what­ev­er. So I have spent a labo­ri­ous sev­er­al days excis­ing REAL­NESS from many sto­ries and sit­u­a­tions that, frankly, most of you nev­er paid any atten­tion to any­way. The sce­nar­ios in ques­tion were the least inter­est­ing of any I sub­mit for your perusal on this blog, and so while it was very bor­ing to do all the stuff I had to do to Change The Names To Pro­tect The Inno­cent, it also makes almost no dif­fer­ence to the fas­ci­na­tion quo­tient of the blog itself. I actu­al­ly had some fun mak­ing up names, so there you go, lemons into lemon­ade. WHEW.

So I’m back! All search engines are GO. We’re in business.

Most impor­tant­ly, I must address the long-delayed (OK, three days) pub­li­ca­tion of my recipe for a new and extreme­ly green soup. The beau­ty of this soup is that you can clear your con­science of that full, unopened bag of spinach you bought a week ago and still… haven’t used. It’s not fresh enough for sal­ad, or even for pas­ta, but soup? Heck yes.

Spinach and Leek Soup
(serves six-ish for a starter)

4 tbsps butter
5 leeks, white parts only, sliced, washed and drained
1/2 white onion, chopped roughly
4 cloves garlic
at least 5 cups chick­en stock
1 large bag or large bunch spinach leaves, care­ful­ly washed
1 cup light cream
salt and pep­per to taste

Melt but­ter in a heavy-bot­tomed saucepan and sweat leeks, onion and gar­lic till soft. Pour over chick­en stock to cov­er, gen­er­ous­ly, and sim­mer for 45 min­utes. Add spinach and stir care­ful­ly till soft­ened, then whizz with a hand blender till com­plete­ly pureed. Add cream and sea­son to taste.

John sug­gests per­haps a driz­zle of cream at the end to gar­nish. You could serve with crispy toast and goats cheese, but we were pret­ty hap­py stand­ing up around the stove drink­ing it out of a ladle.

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More lat­er, but right now I must con­tin­ue watch­ing cov­er­age of Boris Yeltsin’s funer­al. It is bring­ing back such strong mem­o­ries of our time liv­ing in Rus­sia in the ear­ly 90s when Yeltsin was the sweet­est thing you could imag­ine, or at least so we thought, and we were all run­ning around with breath­less inter­preters, dis­cov­er­ing Russ­ian artists and pri­vatis­ing the gov­ern­ment willy-nil­ly. Much has been revealed to be fool­ish or at least quixot­ic about our actions, but we were young and it all sound­ed like a good idea back then. What rich­es, in memory.