Pumpkin Gnocchi with rosemary and cobnuts

So it's autumn, and the markets are bulging.  There have been comments in the media repeatedly recently about how the awful summer has made for bad harvests and so on, and I'm sure that's right - I saw it in the fields in Cornwall in the summer - but it hasn't shown up at our farmers' market yet.  Even so, I'm doing a bit of trying to eat less meat and make more of the vegetables and generally reduce our impact a bit, as well as minimising the hit to wallet, waistline and world that meat represents.  In fairness, this is made a bit easier because Brixton farmers' market doesn't have what I regard as a stellar meat stall, so I'm safe enough.  When nobody has big hunks of ham hock or pork shoulder sitting out in pride of place on their stall, it's easy enough not to have made carnitas for dinner again.

The squashes were great when I showed up at the market a week or two ago and I bought a huge kabocha with a lot of enthusiasm and no plan at all.  Some of it became soup (some of which is still in the bottom of the freezer), and more became curry, and quite a lot became these gnocchi.  Squash goes a long way between two hungry squash eaters.

And I bought cobnuts, despite the fact I didn't own a nut cracker.  I shot a few of them across the room before I hit on the teatowel/rolling pin combo, and since then they've shown up in piecrust and pesto and a heap of other things...and Tom bought me a nutcracker, after nut shrapnel punctuated his work-related Skype call from across the room.

I've never been that hot at gnocchi - they always fall apart or come out gummy or both.  I know you need to keep the amount of flour down to minimise the chew, but you do need some to keep them together and so on.  I think I hit on the answer this time: a good firm fleshed pumpkin.  The ordinary butternuts are too wet.  If they're what you have to use, chop then roast, rather than steam, to maximise the amount of water you drive off.

Somehow these became a speedy we've-been-wandering-around-town-all-day dinner.  They're quicker than you think, really.  All the time is in the prepping and steaming of the veg and the rest is easy.

Pumpkin gnocchi

This recipe makes enough for four, but they freeze really well if you lay them out on a tray lined with baking parchment in your freezer overnight and transfer them to a freezer bag when you next need the tray or the space in the freezer.  You can cook them straight from frozen, too - they take one whole minute longer...that's all.  Instant dinner!

Ingredients

250g potatoes (I used a particular variety known as 'white'. Yeah. High science.  Cheap supermarket baking potatoes, chosen for their ease of peeling. They worked great.) 

300g pumpkin (this was about a quarter of the big kabocha I had. I'm not sure sure specific amounts are really important here.)

The method I was vaguely following (this one from the Independent) told me I needed 160g plain flour.  I didn't, I needed less, and then felt I needed less even than I'd used.  As I said above, you need to err on the side of less, but you'll need to be the judge of your own dough.

A good pinch of salt

Method

First, peel, cube and weigh out the veg, then steam until fork tender (about 20 minutes for half inch cubes of potato and less for the squash).

Make the dressing at this point, so that you can heat it up when the gnocchi are boiling.

Let the veg steam dry and cool for a few minutes before mashing or passing it all together through a potato ricer (which is a thing which looks like a giant garlic press and I only own because I inherited it from my grandmother...the average kitchen shop will have one!).  Add a pinch of salt and around 80g of plain flour.  Mix together - it should form a very soft dough.  You're looking I think for something which holds together and which can, with the aid of flour, be persuaded not to stick to too many things.  I suspect you'll need around 120g of flour in total, but start lower and work up.

When you think it's reached a good consistency, divide the dough into four portions and, on a floured surface and with well floured hands, roll each one into a rope around a half inch thick.

Gently reheat the pan with the dressing, and set a big wide pan of water to boil.

I used a bench knife to slice the ropes into little sweetie-type cushions, and then poked them a bit until they were all about the same thickness.  Drop as many as will fit in a single layer into your pan.

Gnocchi are magic, and sink to the bottom until they're cooked, and then bob up to be fished out by you with your slotted spoon.

Transfer your little dumplings to the hot butter sauce (careful, spitty), and keep cooking until all are in the sauce.  Carefully turn them over to coat them, and serve on warm plates with parmesan grated over.

Cobnut butter dressing with rosemary

(This is enough for a half recipe of gnocchi)

Ingredients

I used a double handful of unshelled fresh cobnuts...I forgot to weigh them.  Bad Hazel.  I suspect 100g of shelled hazelnuts would be more than enough.

A sprig of rosemary (thyme would similarly have been lovely, but neighbours don't leave thyme bushes invitingly hanging over their garden walls for casual passersby to harvest the odd needle from...)

A pinch of chilli flakes (optional)

100g of very best salted butter

1 clove garlic, thinly sliced

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Shell the nuts if required, using a more efficient method than a rolling pin and a tea towel, and chop them coarsely.

Heat the butter in a big frying pan and when hot add the nuts and rosemary.  Cook gently until the nuts begin to colour, then remove the rosemary and stir in the chilli flakes and garlic.  Cook for 30 seconds more, until you can smell the garlic.  Remove from the heat and grind over plenty of black pepper and a small pinch of salt.

Keep to one side until the gnocchi are ready.

Cinnamon whey bread buns.

There are days when you never finish anything.  There are days when you barely start anything without getting distracted.  There are days when you find you forgot to do one important thing and have given your time to fifteen pointless ones. There are days when it gets to five pm and you realise with horror that you have achieved nothing, but nothing, and rush to cram some work into the last hour of the day and end up staying on just so you can feel like you accomplished something, and still leave hours later knowing you haven't.

For those days, there is baking.  You can come home and break out the emergency butter and emergency sugar, and weigh and mix and taste and cook, and at the end you have something to show for it.  It might be late, but who cares? You have buns - and tomorrow you can take them into the office and people will say nice things and it will be another day.

Yeast dough isn't usually for evening baking, and this whey bread isn't really for making cinnamon buns, but they came together quick enough and with hot coffee made for the perfect breakfast.

I used Dan Lepard's sweet whey bread recipe from The Handmade Loaf, which begins with the instructions for how to make fresh cheese using rennet, which I never have in.  I have made a paneer a few times with lemon juice or yoghurt, though, and freeze the whey to make this slightly enriched bread.  He makes it into a slightly sweet soft white sandwich bread, good for breakfast toasting and similar.  It's like a less rich challah, to my mind - with butter and milk but no eggs.  Tom and I have made it a few times and cut the honey somewhat to make it better for savoury uses.  Here I kept the honey at the original levels to keep the sweetness.

I haven't tried making this with ordinary milk.  I suspect you could sub 150ml milk, simmered for a minute and mixed with 150ml cold water.  The simmering kills enzymes and changes proteins and similar, and mixing it with cold water will  both drop the temperature and give the liquid a texture closer to whey.  Haven't tried it though.  I usually use this technique for making paneer - it's very quick, and the paneer itself is delicious in Indian recipes or, if you don't press it, as a soft cheese to eat with berries and the like instead of yoghurt.

The filling is a standard one for Tom and I - 75g salted butter; 75g dark brown sugar; 15g powdered cinnamon.  Soften the butter (but don't melt it totally) and mix the other two ingredients into it.

After the dough has risen twice and is ready for its final shaped rise, on a floured surface roll it and push it out into an oblong roughly 18 inches by 36 and spread the filling all over it.  Roll it up tightly and slice it into 2 inch rolls.  Pack them into a baking tin lined with paper, close but not quite touching.  I used a 9 inch square cake tin for the 'presentation' buns, and put the mucky off cuts into a round sponge tin.

Preheat the oven while the buns do their final 45 minute rise (now they'll be butting up against one another), then bake according to Dan's instructions, checking ten minutes before the end (buns bake quicker than loaves) and switching the tins around a couple of times during baking.  They should be well risen and golden brown.

While the buns bake, make a quick glaze by heating together the juice of one lemon with 30g of caster sugar.  Boil it for a few minutes until it begins to get syrupy (the bubbles begin to get larger).  As soon as the buns come out brush this all over their surface.

I felt better.

Pistachio petit-four cake.

I have had a fascination with this cake for some considerable number of months.  I've been wanting to make it and wanting to make it and wanting to make for AGES.  I very much love Deb's Smitten Kitchen  blog - so much so that I pre-ordered her cookbook the day it came out and I'm waiting with bated breath for it to show up.  In the meantime, I'm baking my way through the back numbers - which brought me here.

I was explaining the cake to Will - while we were eating enormous steaks, now I think about it - and bemoaning the fact that it's hard to make for work and anyway was enough of a spectacle that it really needed an event suitable for it.  Whereupon Will invited me to his birthday bash, which involves approaching 20 people in his parents' beautiful house, barbecuing, eating and drinking...  Also plenty of chasing about with two labradoodles, one of whom was clearly designed to be in a cartoon, trying to make friends with the horses and biting nails over the Olympics.  Brilliant.

The cake itself is remarkably easy to make.  That's sort of the thing about baking - you do one step after the other, just like the recipe says, and it all comes right in the end.  You do have to measure, and it is worth doing the little things that seem fussy, like weighing your batter into the tins to make sure they're the same thickness or browning the nuts before you grind them...and when you do that, it all works.  I only had 2 cake pans for a 3 layer cake, so I did a lot of weighing out of ingredients and dividing them so that I could bake in stages.

Producing the cake was overkill.  Totally.  It was enormously excessive and unnecessary, and went down brilliantly.  I will do it again.

Guacamole.

So normally making guacamole is very simple for me: I put an avocado into one of Tom's hands and a knife in the other, and say something like; 'We're having chill for dinner!' and guacamole happens.  I genuinely didn't know how, until, deserted, I had to figure out how to make it for myself.

Here are most of the ingredients.  Typically, I didn't pull one key element out of the refrigerator but we can have that as a surprise later.

NB that piece of chilli is frozen - they come in great big bags, especially if you buy them at the Indian grocers, and nobody can finish them that fast.  I freeze them and then cut lumps off as required - they defrost enough to be easily to cut in about 2 minutes.

First task is avocado stoning, where you halve the beast, smack a knife into the stone (carefully avoiding cutting off own hand at wrist, or any wayward fingers) and then turn the knife like a clock hand to release the stone.  This works like a dream, though I sometimes find getting the soapy stone off the knife is a bit of an adventure.

Using a butter knife, dice the avocado flesh and then remove it to a bowl with a spoon.  Voila:

Juice your half lime and sprinkle over some salt. Leave to macerate for 20 minutes or so, while you mince 1 large clove of garlic and about an inch of red chilli.

(sneak tomato portrait) 

Cut a medium-large tomato in half and remove the seeds (I usually throw them in the main dish, if it's a saucy one), and then cut the flesh into large dice.  Take the leaves off around 6 big sprigs of coriander/cilantro and chop coarsely.

Pour off any lime juice which hasn't been absorbed into the avocado and mash it a bit with a fork or a spoon, depending on how ripe your avocado was.  Stir in the chilli, garlic and tomato.  Add the coriander/cilantro just before you serve it, and taste to see if it needs more salt.  With chips, chilli, quesadillas, tamales, bread...anything, really.  It doesn't keep so you really should finish it.  Yes.  That's why you should finish it.  Ahem.

Technically, 1 ordinary avocado could probably be said to yield 2 servings.  This has never really been noticeable for me.

Making Guac, the Tom Way

Take one soft avocado.  Cut around the stone and separate the halves.  Smack a large knife into the stone (miss own arm and fingers) and give a slight turn to remove the stone.  Use the butter knife to dice the flesh and then spoon it into a bowl.  Add the juice of half a lime and around half a teaspoon of salt.  Leave to macerate for around 20 minutes.

In the meantime, finely dice half a deseeded chilli and a clove of garlic.  Remove the seeds from half a medium-large tomato and dice the flesh quite chunkily; a finely sliced spring onion is optional.  Coarsely chop the leaves from 6 or so sprigs of coriander/cilantro.

Drain any excess lime juice from the avocado and mash it coarsely.  Stir in everything else.  Eat all at once, with gusto, chips or Mexican dishes.

Er.  This was the day it got to bedtime and I found I'd accidentally made fairy cakes.  True story.  These things happen to me...

Success! (with pitta)

I had a marvellous weekend.  Stuff went well.  I cleaned, to start with.  Sometimes that's a mood that takes me.  The weather was beautiful.  A friend came around for dinner.  We went to Ikea, and even that was fun.  I managed to scrounge a lift to the supermarket and didn't have to do my shopping online.  I learned to play a new piece of music on the concertina AND figured it out sort of on the guitar. 

We'll skate over the dental experiences of Friday and the fact that my lover is still 5,000 miles away - though the first of those was less bad than it could have been, and the second, well, he seems to be having fun and sends me a lot of photos.*

But Success with Pitta, on the third attempt, was my crowning glory.  I cheered when I saw the balloon in the oven.  The key is a blisteringly hot oven...

Pitta Bread
Adapted from The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

454g bread flour – I used a combination of flours, because I’m the kind of person who can get excited about that kind of thing, and went with 200g of strong white bread flour, 200g of 00 flour and 50g of spelt because I like how it tastes. Don’t use too much wholemeal, but otherwise any bread flour combination will be fine.
295g water at room temperature (using leftovers in the kettle is a good option, chlorine is bad)
12g salt (around 2tsp, err on the low side)
7g instant yeast (one of those little sachets)
27g olive oil (around 2tbsp)

Combine everything in a bowl into a sticky mass then cover the bowl with a plate and go away for half an hour. This lets the flour soak up the water properly, making it easier to work.

Kneading. This is a soft dough, it’s going to be sticky. Remove all jewellery, then scrape it out of the bowl into your hands. Proceed to stretch in your hands and then scrunch it back up and pull it in a different direction, keeping it in the air so it doesn’t stick to anything except your hands.

Keep going for 10 minutes. You’ll notice the dough changing in texture – you’ll be able to stretch it more before it starts to break. If you haven’t used any brown flour, you should be able to stretch the dough into a little windowpane without it breaking. Your arms will probably hurt a bit, but hey, got to get the workout in…

Using your third hand (or significant other, or just dealing with the fact you’re going to cover the bottle in dough), drop about a teaspoon of oil in the bottom of a bowl. It can be the first bowl, with bits still stuck to it, don’t look at me for extra washing up. Scrape the dough off your hands into one lump and put it on top of the oil, turning it to coat.

Cover the bowl again, and put the dough in the fridge for at least 4 hours, punching it down every half an hour or so. You can leave it there for up to 3 days.

An hour before you’re ready to bake, turn the oven on to its highest setting – if you’ve got the option of dual grill/oven, use that to get the temperature up as high as you can. Put a cast iron skillet in to preheat, too, or your very thickest baking sheet.

Half an hour before baking, take the dough out of the fridge and divide into 12 more or less equal Clementine sized balls. Start with the first ball formed, keeping the rest covered with a cloth. On a floured surface, roll each ball out as far as it will go (probably only about 10cm at this point) and re-cover to relax.

Go round again, and roll the first round of dough out to less than half a centimetre thick – they will be around 18cm in diameter. Keep flouring!

Check the oven temperature – it should be about as hot as it goes at this point. I Love My Oven Thermometer, and it read around 250 degrees C. Transferring your round of dough onto the hot surface without it getting all folded up is a bit of a skill, but I discovered the oven glove was a better tool than my hand because it was wider and flatter and had fewer things to catch on. The other oven glove was definitely involved in the handling of the hot pan. I only managed to burn my knee and was reasonably thrilled about that.

Slap the dough round onto the hot skillet, quickly close the oven and time 3 minutes. The bread should have puffed up like a balloon. Pick it out with tongs and move to a wire rack to cool; repeat with each round.

Stuff with Stuff. I made falafel, but halloumi and salad and pickled chillies is a bit of a fantasy for the remaining breads, which are in my freezer awaiting inspiration…

*Of VOODOO DONUTS, no less.

Civilisation.

The British Museum is one of my all time favourite places. I find history fascinating, and am in awe of the ingenuity of our species throughout time. Vast palace without metal tools? Sorted, 2,500 years ago. Symmetrical, polished stone statues three times the height of a man made of a rock found many miles from where you want it? We've got this, 3,500 years ago. Beautiful polished axe heads made of hard and beautiful greenstone taking hundreds of hours to make? We did that, 5,000 years ago. And you can still see these thing. We made beautiful things, perfect things, way back before we had running water or cures for diseases or reliable long distance communication - at the same time women ground wheat for flour by hand, on their knees, for so many hours every day that it permanently damaged their skeletons. They would be breathtaking achievements today, but so much bigger then.

The mummies bother me - dead bodies on display like this - but that thought forces another: that's a person. What would he think of me, of this, of us? What would strike him most about today, if he got up and dug his eyes out of that canopic jar over there, untangled all his layers of bandages and wasn't too distracted by the fact somebody had pulled his brain out through his nose with a hook...?

Nanowrimo...

I should say, I'm not doing it. I feel I'd be setting myself up for failure, though kudos to those who do, like Hannah here, who might kill for this if she ever sees it...

(Hannah is beautiful, for reference, see here, even if she is dressed as a zombie.)

I had half a mind earlier this week to try and write a blog post every day or similar, but I decided that was probably too much. I wrote an epic 2,750 word email yesterday, and today I read much less of a book about investment. I did get to eat this brilliant cinnamon bun though. The Nordic Bakery is brilliant...

 

Before all of that, and nearly too late - I made possibly my all time favourite thing to make...

 

...mincemeat. I love Christmas cooking. And soon, I will make stollen.

A Zombie Tea Party

Courtesy of Graham

I love being a host.  It's so satisfying to put a group of people in a room and and watch them talk.  I love feeding them, and talking to them, and introducing them to one another.  I love being the catalyst, the centre of the web.  It's what I loved about producing theatre - being the facilitator, creating the space and conditions for other people to do things, which in turn makes something larger than the sum of its parts.  It's what is fun about being a civil servant, in a way, and why I want to run a food businesss - the creation of conditions for good things to happen.

We got it right with this party - all the time we spent sending invitations designed to make people laugh, ratchetting up enthusiasm, making cake, well and truly paid off.
 

The house was full, everyone talked, the pumpkins were carved, the skulls were decorated,  games were played.  People met new people.

Another one of Graham's. (They're mine...)

 Great evening.

Getting up at 5.30 on your birthday, or How To Make Croissants...

 

We all know I love to bake.  I would be a whole lot fatter without my work colleagues to help.  There are certain traditional times when everyone brings in something edible into the office: birthdays, and when they come back from holidays.  I add in 'whenever I feel like baking' to that list...and that's often.  So when I get to one of the times when everyone brings things in, I'm on my mettle to produce something a bit more....so I spent 3 days making croissants for my birthday.

It began on Friday night, when I mixed sourdough leaven and yeast poolish (batters made of flour, water and wild or cultured yeast).

Leaven - sourdough batter, made with equal parts water and 00 flour and a spoonful of my sourdough culture. Poolish is
identical, but switch a tiny amount of commercial yeast for the culture. I have no idea why it should be called poolish....

It finished as the sun came up on my birthday.  In fact. this is what before dawn on your birthday looks like if it's mid October and you live in London:

Monday 17th October, about 7.20am.

Croissants are a bit of a faff, even for somebody who really doesn't think that 24 hours is too long to wait for a loaf of bread.  You make something a bit like a baguette dough (so that's very soft and very white)...

Dough bulk rising.

and you roll it out, plonk a slab of butter in the middle and wrap it up like a parcel...

Laminating croissant dough with butter: and roll and fold and roll and fold and roll and fold and...

...and you roll it and fold it twice every half hour, for 3 hours, until, eventually, you're allowed to shape them.

Aren't they cute? I was aiming for mini ones, but they baked up to suitable breakfast size...

It was Sunday evening by this stage - I could probably have got to this point 24 hours earlier but I wanted to make sure I could bake them on Monday morning, because who wants a day old croissant?  I was going out with my friends to have brunch on Sunday, too, so it's a good job the dough is pretty forgiving - you can put it in the freezer and things to slow it down.  Next time I make them though I want to do what they tell me about when I bake them, because I'm hopeful that will just perfect the texture.

On Monday morning, they looked like this:

All glazed up.

And they baked beautifully.  Everybody thought I was mad, but *I* was the one who spent a whole hour on the bus with the heady smell of fresh croissants warm on my lap instead of stinky London morning commuters.

I'm not going to try and write out the recipe, it would take too much explanation.  Tom and I have a new Bible -

It's really excellent, if you're into this kind of thing.  Lots of detail, lots of explanation, lots of wonderful photos.  I think the croissant recipe would probably total about 20 pages, but it's hard to count and certainly not that hard to do.  This is the second time I've made this recipe and they really did come out well.  I am beginning to think I might make a few changes next time, because I'm not getting just the texture I want, but I need more time for that - and a lot of people to eat them...

There are a few more photos here.

Sunday Afternoon.

I bought a coat - a spy coat.  Trench coat.  Double-breasted, mid length, mac.  Inspector Gadget, or flasher chic if you forget the trilby.  They're everywhere right now.  I've been looking for one  for a while, and my housemate handed me a 30% off, one day only, voucher for Gap he didn't think he would be using.  I went to get out of the house, and because I thought they'd probably have something.  I found the coat.  It was grey rather than the traditional camel colour I really wanted - which was a bit of an issue as a friend has a similar item.  Anyway.  I put it on.  It fitted pretty well and I liked the longish length it had going.  I took an iPhone picture in the mirror to send to  Tom for Opinions.  I wandered around the shop for a while clutching the coat and waiting for an answer. After 10 minutes I had exhausted the shop and decided just to buy the coat. 30% is a good deal, and  it's just on today, and it IS the kind of coat I've been looking for, and I don't spend THAT much time with the friend.  As I leave, I get a text.  'Out with Jenn, we both agree the coat is only so-so.'  I turn  around and go back into the shop. I know I will never wear the coat. I tell the cashier that a friend has just told me she owns the exact same coat, because saying 'my boyfriend doesn't really like it' sounds  even more dumb.  He gives me an odd look, but returns it for me...7 whole minutes after he sold  it to me.

I text Tom the story.  His response: I love you.  I tell him that he's the only person on earth who would...

What To Do With Monster.

I went on holiday for a month.  It was hot and sunny in the south of France, and damp and English in London.  My garden has become a jungle, and everything is a size bigger than it should be.

 
There are mushrooms three inches across under the birch trees and clearly the homes of gnomes, a bright yellow pumpkin as big as my head which looks like a roc's egg, runner beans 18 inches long and fat with big purple beans, where the snails haven't got them - and under the parasol leaves near the front of the vegetable patch I found Monster.

Monster is a courgette.  Monster weighs 1.5kg, or 3.5lb in old money.  Monster is practically as long as my arm.  My dad told me not to take him on a train because he might get classed as an offensive weapon.  Who could possibly be offended by Monster?!

His eating demanded ceremony and attention.  I didn't think he was going to get cooked at all, my week is so busy.  Today my curry date (third in a week, but all delicious) cancelled a little to my relief.  I will see the friend next week for idli and dosai, and we will be both be relaxed and ready.  All the way home on the bus I pondered.   I googled and thought and risked antagonising the motion sickness and the smelly man with ear hair who sat beside me for a while.

Monster: roasted with lemon and rosemary; stuffed with crispy sausagemeat, chilli and pear.

I knew there was going to be sausage, but it took a Nigel Slater recipe, obviously, to tell me that I wanted it to be *crispy*.  The rest is my idea...

Marrow with crispy sausage and pear
Serves 2 very hungry people, or 3 with a salad
1 large courgette, or several smaller ones, weighing about 1kg in total after trimming.
Rosemary sprigs (about six 2 inch ones)
1 lemon
olive oil
8 butcher's sausages, around 400g
1 hard conference pear
1 tbsp coarsely chopped parsley
1 small red chilli
3 cloves garlic
Sea salt and black pepper

Preheat the oven to 220℃.  Cut the courgette into 3 inch lengths, and then in half vertically.  With a spoon, scrape out the spongy inner flesh (and add to your compost to feed to next year's Monster).  In a large bowl, toss the pieces with a couple of spoonsful of oil, the zest of the lemon, plenty of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.  Place the pieces skin side up in a heavy roasting tin or casserole dish and tuck rosemary sprigs all around and inside.  Bake for 20 minutes, or until beginning to colour, then flip the pieces over.  It will probably take 40 minutes all told, it's done when a fork goes all the way through easily but don't overdo it.

Meanwhile, chop the chilli and garlic finely.  Strip the sausagemeat out of the skins.  Heat a spoonful of oil in a cast iron pan until shimmering and crumble the meat into it - you may need two pans, or to do this in batches.  If you crowd the pan the meat will steam and not go crispy.  Try not to disturb it too much until it has begun to caramelise.  Get it nice and brown, adding the garlic and chilli for the final 5 minutes.  As it fries, chop the pear into quarters, core and slice each quarter into pieces half a centimetre thick.  Remove the meat to a dish and keep warm.  In the same pan, fry the pear until it takes a little colour, then add the juice of half the lemon and let it evaporate.  Add plenty of salt and pepper, and return the sausage to the pan to combine.  Stir in the parsley.  Taste for seasoning.

When the marrow is cooked, discard the rosemary and serve with the meat.

No word processor.

Did you ever play 'should've said'?  Probably not, though you might have seen it, if improvised comedy is your thing.  In Edinburgh and a few other places.  A scene is started between two performers - about anything at all, usually the audience is asked for a prompt.  At interesting moments, or boring moments, or any time at all that they feel like it, the audience can call out 'should've said' and the person who has just said something must say something different.  With good performers, it means you can get all the funnies possible out of a given position or character or whatever.  It's great.

I play it in my head all the time.  I guess everyone does - that argument you had with someone where, when you leave, you think of all the smart and cunning things you should have said.  Or probably shouldn't have said.  Or would never have had the guts to say.  Wish you had had the guts to say.  Going back to insert a paragraph, to edit in a more pleasing turn of phrase.  I'm not really sure where to go with this except that it's an interesting sort of thought.  What's done stays happen, you can't change it, there's no point agonising?  Maybe that's the virtue of it.  Handwritten, or on a typewriter - ink directly onto paper, anyway.  No virtual words, just indelible ones, albeit in an ink that seems to run when it gets time on it.

Sometimes I go back to diary entries and read over them.  I have diaries of one sort or another going back years.  They have varying degrees of secrecy depending on my mood at the time.  When I'm sad, it gets locked away and nobody can read it, but when I'm happy the world knows.  Is that the right way around?  Probably.  But I'm always amazed at how inaccurately I remember things, how memory mangles things.  Sometimes the edit process has come in and I 'remember' saying or hearing things that weren't heard or said.  Somethings that were a big deal when I was 17 I don't even remember at all now; the entries in the diary, that I thought would point me exactly to the right memory, elicit nothing.  I have prided myself on quite a good memory for events, the facts of them.  Something about feeling compelled to take notes all the time.  Even if I don't ACTUALLY write things up, I still sort of feel that I am.  Maybe that's actually the problem? When I write things down I'm automatically composing.  That probably makes sense.  Anyone who reads and has an interest in words is hard pushed not to polish their own, I suspect.

It's interesting to think that everybody is probably writing in just such an inaccurate way as I am.  Newspapers.  Diaries.  Reports.  No matter how factual one tries to be, words are about atmosphere.  They pass a value judgment no matter how colourless they're meant to be.  Totally untrustworthy.  And we can't totally unpick them, either.  No matter how carefully they are taken apart and cleaned and twisted and turned around and examined, all we have to discuss them with are more words.

Too sleepy for the end of this thought.  I have spent a long time thinking about memory, but I am also spending time in this job thinking about history.  A lot of history comes from governments, and here I am writing things that contribute to that history.  My words, my spin, my impressions.  I have more opportunity to use them than I did before, and they count for more.  It might not be fiction writing or poetry, but my typing is more weighted than it was before.  And not by much.  I'm not running the world.  I'm interpreting it and smoothing it and shaping it, which seems pretty powerful from my desk next to the printer on the third floor.

Ecclesiastes 3.1-8

¹To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
 ²A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
 ³A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
 ⁴A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
 ⁵A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
 ⁶A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
 ⁷A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
 ⁸A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

I got to read this once in Chapel. Hard to do in a way that makes it mean anything, I found, mostly because varying your tone in way that differentiates one pair of phrases from another rapidly becomes difficult. All of those repetitions don't mean the same in the way you might expect them to, either.  Well. They're all about balance of one sort or another and there's solace in that rather Buddhist idea. That everything has its opposite, that generally the good times and the bad times go together and nobody gets just one or the other.  I'm not sure that a piece of practical criticism is right.  I was tempted.  I suspect there are a dozen sermons you could find on every line, not to mention on the whole passage.  It's a bit hackneyed, really.  But the aphorisms have a place in a secular existence.  Sometimes you need to start from the bottom up.  Sometimes you get to reap the rewards.  Sometimes you have to cry to remember how to be happy.  Sometimes you have to throw stuff away.  Sometimes you need to let your hair down.  Sometimes it's for you.  Sometimes it's for others.  Sometimes things are over.

Sometimes they start fresh and new and full of promise. Optimism.  Hope.  Smiles.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh*

It's September.  Things always happen in September.  The real New Year is now, when the weather is uncertain and the holiday is over.  Lives grow across the winter while the crops have their sleep, and lives rest in the summer while the plants race.  The old academic year of northern Europe is built as much around the fact that children were available to study in the winter time when the land was quiet as it is around the religious calendar.  At school it always felt as though a labour in the dark and the cold would reach its full growth when the sun shone again.  I work best now - a rush of energy from here to Christmas and then Christmas to Easter, and then a final push to put the gloss on the fruit before the laze of the summer.  A rhythm as old as myself and much older. 

So it's good to be starting a new job now.  Great, in fact.  The first-day-of-school feeling is the same as it ever was - nervous excitement combined with a desire to apply oneself.  A summer over and term begun.  This position is a totally new world for me, alien in the extreme.  It's so different from anything else I have done or could be doing.  I have responsibility.  Things I do will make a real difference to society if not individuals.  That feeling goes through the place - it's not a job you do unless you care a bit.  It makes the atmosphere wonderful.

It's not a time to peep, though peeping is all you can do to begin with.  Everything is changing.  [Everything is always changing. Maybe one should never peep?]  I am applying last year's lessons, about openness and optimism and smiling at strangers.  This year's curriculum is about purpose and collaboration and maybe ambition.  Bring it on.


*Ecclesiates 3.4 (King James Version)

A recent revelation.

I realised that if I had a child, it wouldn't be mine it would be ours - of me and its father (or other mother, but that's getting more complex).  I wouldn't be alone with it.  Sounds silly, right?  Yes.  Amazing how obvious it sounds.  But to know it properly felt very strange.  It was one of those dreamlike moments where there is a sudden certainty.  I imagine those who have true religious faith have that feeling sometimes.  It wasn't such a terrifying idea any more, the being solely responsible for another human being thing, because I wouldn't be solely responsible.  It halves the burden, like a partnership is meant to - and you have to have some knowledge of a truly mutual relationship to understand that.  It's only fairly recently that I've begun to have some inkling as to what one of them might be, too.

Not that I'm certain about the procreation thing.  Apart from the biological icky (of which there is plenty...piles, peeing, sleeplessness, nappies, GIVING BIRTH and so on) and even with the sharing element, it's still an enormous thing, the biggest life change I think it must ever be possible to make.  You get over the icky, I guess.  Plenty of elements of being human are icky.  As well as personal responsibility there are more peripheral moral or social elements too.  Hard to think about them, though - human society since the beginning has been about the raising of children, always.  It's one of the basic purposes of civilisation.  Perhaps the basic purpose.  Now, though, one might think about pressure on resources and levels of pollution and so on, and whether it is possible to justify having a child in that environment.  And one also might wonder how we as a nation or indeed wider western society can support our ever greying population if we, those of us in our twenties and thirties, don't have children.  I don't know if the two sides of that quite cancel out.

I have been saying for a while that I'd like to foster children.  Again, there's a selfishness there - if I have care of a child that is not my own flesh and blood, I do not have the same expectation for it or want the same things from it.  I'm not expecting it to enjoy the same things I enjoy or follow the same paths I did - its aptitudes will not be mine.  I will be forced much more to take the child as the starting point, not my own hopes for it.  Of course I would hope I could do that with a biological child as well, but I can see ways it would be much more difficult.  I'm sure there's an element of contrariness, too.  There is in nearly everything I do however much I want to dodge it - 'everyone else wants this, therefore I want something different'.  It's not the same as never ordering the same as anyone else in a restaurant though.  It would be nice to do some good.  I've had a lot.  Some kids get abandoned at the age of 3.  I suspect that it would require some large lifestyle shifting.  I haven't researched it enough, it's not as though it's something I am in any way ready for now, and probably not for another decade.

I'm less anti than I was.  I used to say nevernevernever.  It's hard to imagine having kids later in your life because it's very difficult to comprehend where you will be later in your life, particularly when you're still a kid yourself.  I'm still a kid myself.  Aren't I?  I feel like a kid.  I find myself thinking about it more and more.  There's 30, that magic number after which incidences of genetic malfunction increase dramatically.  It's four and a bit years away.  Boys don't have that deadline.  I sort of feel I have to have made a decision by then, I guess.  Four and a bit years often doesn't seem long enough.  I fall back like everyone else on 'wait and see'.  I don't want to miss now in worrying about then.  But I don't want to miss then for being too caught up in now.