cooking – Page 2 – Louisa Parry

Food metres, great taste, dog identification

1. We’re supposed to have leftover risotto for lunch but what should have been a side dish for that becomes our main dish instead: John’s Grandma’s marrow flower fritters, made with flowers, courgettes and eggs from our garden. The risotto can wait for another day.

2. The holy basil cuts through the spice. It’s ages since I’ve had any Thai food and this is just wonderful.

3. The pub is full of dogs when we arrive and we sit near the terrier and the other one we can’t identify – she looks like a labrador in the distance – perfect shape and proportion but tiny. She looks so soft, smooth and uniformly black that we’re transfixed by her. Later on, we discover what it is: her owners don’t realise when she escapes and wanders around the pub introducing herself to everyone. After she’s nearly completed her round and heads over to the dog-loving shift manager for a hug, her owner spots her and says “oh look, there’s another Patterdale like Jessie.” Then he realises and laughs, and with a smile, warns us off the dark Erdinger.

Mystery marinade, good show, cooling down

9/7/2010 / louisa / 0 Comments

1. I throw various things into the marinade and when I’m spreading it on the meat, I worry it’s too many flavours – but it isn’t. The crisp skin is salty and spicy, but more than that too – rounded, pleasantly complex. Another George’s Marvellous Medicine cooking attempt worked out well.

2. When they hold hands – something I’ve been begging them to do when the wife offers everything to make her husband happy – I nearly cheer. They — all the groups — do so well, I’m so proud.

3. Finally feeling cool again as the night air chills the sweat on my skin.

Not at all alone with the moon – a day of company

28/6/2010 / louisa / 0 Comments

1. All of Team Peach is on the bed when we wake up and we sing the ‘Team Peach on the Bed’ song. (“Team Peach on the bed, fa la la la la. Carla on the bed, La la la la la. Boron on the bed, Bee bee bee bee bee. Lily on the bed, Lil alil lil lil. Team Peach on the Bed, Carla, Bee and Lil.” Yes.)

2. We cook together for the second night in a row – last night working together filling skewers then bbqing them, today working side by side on our own mammoth creations. Cooking is usually a solitary activity, it’s nice to have company for a change.

3. He washes, I dry and we both sing along to the music.

3BT – soft & even, play time, the new recipe

31/5/2010 / louisa / 0 Comments

1. Her freshly clipped coat feels like velvet.

2. We worry – as we always do – that the play is bordering on fighting but the woman assures us that it is definitely play. The dogs bounce around together amongst the oak trees as we talk about them behind their backs.

3. The slow-rise bread – 22 hours in the making – comes out of the oven too late to eat with dinner so we have it as dessert instead. Its golden dome is perfectly cracked, its centre spongy & bubbled.

3BT – light/dark, improvisation, pillow purr

27/5/2010 / louisa / 0 Comments

Between illness and busy-ness, May has been a tough month – I need to start Three Beautiful Thing-ing again to refocus on the good bits!

1. I sit in a pool of light in the woods reading about mysterious things in the dark depths of the sea.

2. We’ve left it too late to go to the shop before dinner but John improvises and it’s lovely.

3. The purring of the cat curled around my head drowns out the white noise of the rain.

Sausages!

27/4/2010 / louisa / 0 Comments

One of my ten goals for 2010 was to learn how to make sausages. I’ll admit it was a bit of an easy one — the “make to-do” list item on your to-do list just so you can cross something off straight away — as I was already planning on attending a sausage making course in March. When March came along though, I was incredibly disappointed when we had to cancel our places a couple of days before the course – and delighted when Rachel, the course organiser, said they were running the course again a month later, and would we like to attend that instead?

The course took place on Saturday at Old Sleningford Farm – a lovely informal community/small holding near Ripon in North Yorkshire. The drive up showed off Yorkshire at its best – the sun shining on all the hills, dales and cute cottage-filled villages – and when we got there, the group were having a cup of tea in the sunshine next to the herb garden. There were five of us on the course, plus Rachel & Martin, who ran the session together.

Once the tea was supped, we headed into the purpose-built kitchen and Rachel & Martin told us about their experiences developing the recipes, how they’d come up with their fatty/lean meat ratio and why they used homemade bread instead of rusk. Then we read through the recipes of the sausages we’d be making – all standard wet pork sausages but we were given two recipes for dried/smoked sausages and throughout the day, they discussed how each stage would be different if we were making them (we also got to try the dried sausages at lunchtime – super yum!). They had also thoughtfully copied out large versions of the recipes and hung them on the walls so we didn’t keep having to refer to our take-home A4 papers.
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