shewhomust | Entries tagged with food

I always rnjoy Rachel Roddy's coolery column in the Guardian, more for her descriptions than for her recipes. I was not in the slightest tempted to cook last week's chocolate and rosemary panna cotta - I didn't even feel much desire to eat it - but I loved what she had to say about aromatic herbs. Their scent, she argues, seems made for our culinary pleasure, but a form of self-defence, a weapon against both both predators and competitors.

Rosemary is particularly kick-arse in this respect, with those volatiles (mostly organic compounds called terpenoids) synthesised and stored in minuscule glands that project from the surface of each dark green needle, which breaks when brushed against or bitten, releasing an intense, hot, bitter shot. It’s the evergreen equivalent of carrying personal defence spray. The needles also mark territory. By leaking their volatiles into the nearby soil, they inhibit the seeds of other plants (maybe even their own) from taking root and, in turn, taking space, water and precious minerals in a challenging environment.

We have a glut of carrots (because reasons) so I baked a carrot cake. I don't often bake cakes, and I was not confident, but I found a recipe which used ingredients I already had (Josceline Dimbleby's Balinese Carrot Cake) and followed it almost faithfully: the honey wasn't as liquid as it should have been, and wouldn't amalgamate, and I reduced the amount of oil because I couldn't quite believe it, and I cooked it in a shallow oval dish, and it was fine. We had some of it hot from the oven for pudding, and some of it sliced as cake, and the latter was better. And there's more in the freezer for another time.

The car failed its MOT: a spring was broken, which I think was part of the suspension. I didn't know you could fail an MOT for that, but apparently so. The garage thought it should not have broken, and replaced it uner warranty, but they kept the car until they could get the replacement part.

I could still have gone to the Graphic Novels reading group, of coure, since I take the train into Newcastle anyway; but not having a lift to and from the station just made it that bit less inviting (also rain) so I zoomed in instead. I wasn't at the meeting which decided that for our next theme we would read comics on the theme 'Winter', and I'm not sure what they had in mind. I look forward to seeing what they come up with as a reading list. I had rememberd that Miracleman's daughter is called Winter, and this was noted, but it is cheating, isn't it? Bryan and Mary Talbot's Rain depicts a relationship growing against a background of floods and environmental action, but it is framed by the 2015 Boxing Day floods in Hebden Bridge, which is undeniably Christmas. And looking through piles of old comics, I found the four issues of Ollie Masters' and Tyler Jenkins' Snow Blind, which I hadn't looked at since I bought them: there's a cover endorement from Warren Ellis, who calls it "an elevated crime drama that feels like it should be the best indie movie of the year" (and I see that it has been made into a movie). Crime drama, certainly, and more than enough bloodshed, but I'd have majored on the coming-of-age aspect: boy discovers that his family is on a Witness Protection Program, and sets out to learn why. For my present purpose, what matters is that they have been relocated to Alaska, providing a dramatic snowy backdrop for confrontations. This isn't Winter, it's just North (which may be a pattern in my collection), but the relocation from Louisiana to Alaska provides an almost-seasonal contrast...

In a small domestic comedy diaster, I managed to drop a pack of black pudding down the back of the freezer. I was rummaging in the depths of the chest freezer for something else, and piled things higher than was wise; this small, flat package slipped off the top and through the gap between wall and lid. By the time durham_rambler was available to help move the freezer and rescue it, it was well on the way to thawing, so there was unscheduled black pudding for dinner last night. Fried with leeks, served with potato and celeriac mash, andI didn't know what wine to choose, but rosé worked very well.

The puffins are returning to the Isle of Muck (though probably not the Isle of Muck youare thinking of). I don't know why this pleasing but very small piece of good news has achieved so much news coverage. And I even more don't know why it is such big news in November, when it must have happened back in the summer.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to see a man about a plaque. Two men, in fact, one to veil the plaque and the other to unveil it.

It was

desperance who first told me about Graeme Rigby's Work in Prepetual Progress, a book about herring. This must have been before he emigrated, so a decade ago, and it was a long-term project then. Now at last Rigby's Encyclopaedia of the Herring has been completed and published, and last week we went to a launch party at the Lit & Phil, and enjoyed many beautiful herring facts (from prehistory to the Radio Ballads), and some herring snacks.

We only went to one event at Durham Book Festival, but it was a good one: Ann Cleeves and Steph McGovern in conversation, chaired by Vic Watson - not that they needed chairing. Two good, interesting speakers, who have become friends in real life, just wind them up and let them go.

We would have liked to stop by after the event, to thank Ann for organising tickets for us - but the signing queue was (the usher estimated) forty minutes long, and led into a closed space which we could not enter. So instead we headed across the river to Veeno for a late lunch. We both wanted to try the deal (which I can't now find on their website) of a glass of orange wine and some fishy nibbles ('dark tuna', whatever that may be, and anchovies). I haven't tried orange wine before, despite it being so fashionable, and was glad of the chance to order a single glass. The staff were keen to warn us that it's a 'marmite' thing, which we would either love or hate: in fact I was underwhelmed. I found it thin, lacking fruit but also lacking anything else in its place, dry though not particularly acid. I'd order the fish again, but with white wine.

Last night's pub quiz took me looping back to the starting point of this post, with the question: what kind of fish are referred to as 'silver darlings'?

...when you're having fun, which we have been, and also when you're busy, which likewise. Fun was a second consecutive weekend of visitors - Bears this time, my brother the

boybear and sister-in-law the GirlBear; busy was mostly clients waking up after the summer and wanting to update their websites (I'm planning a newsletter, to be announced on FaceBook within the next couple of days, can you put a sign-up on my website by then?) but some self-inflicted pub quizzing and book grouping. Also laundry. And plumbers. So this is the condensed version of last weekend.

The Bears arrived on Friday evening. Saturday was cold and rainy, but GirlBear was intrepid and went out and sang Sacred Harp, and returned triumphant and weary with the New!Book! - having been so overwhelmed by the occasion and the weather that she got the wrong bus home, and didn't realise that she was going in the wrong direction until she passed the Angel of the North... The rest of us had a quiet day at home, and felt all the better for it.

On Sunday we lunched at Durham's newest wine bar, Veeno: one of a small chain run by a Sicilian vineyard as a way of marketing their wine, which I think is a great idea. J and J came up from York to lunch with us, which was doubly appropriate since a) they are the perfect companions with whom to explore wine and b) it was J's birthday. Since Veeno had opened only a few days ago, we were greeted with complementary glasses of their own wine, which felt suitably celebratory, though we preferred the bottle of nebbiolo which J selected to accompany our various main courses. It was particularly good with that item on my cheeseboard which I suspect was flavoured with truffle (I have recently come to the conclusion that I don't like truffle, but this cheese was really good). There was marsala for dessert (the vineyard is in Marsala, though this was not their own wine). I suspect that Durham's other wine bar (not open on Sundays) would be grander, but this was a lot of fun, and I'd go back.

I don't now recall at what point in the previous couple of days the boiler had gone on strike, leaving us with no heating and no hot water: not ideal at any time, but especially when there are guests... So it was just as well the Bears had arranged to spend Monday with a friend in Newcastle. We, too, fitted in a long-overdue visit to S, and in the evening, since we were in town, we and the Bears went on to the Bridge Folk Club. The guest was Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne whom

durham_rambler and I had seen and enjoyed a couple of years ago at the Hartlepool Folk Festival, and we enjoyed him all over again: the music's good, if not necessarily what I want to listen to around the house, but the performance is great. There were floor spots, of a generally high standard (not just the Bears, although they had a spot too).

The plan was to insert ourselves into J's busy schedule by meeting her for an early lunch on Tuesday at the Dairy Barn, a farm café near Crook. But

durham_rambler, ever optimistic, had agreed that that the heating engineer, having shown him how to reset the boiler, should return on Tuesday morning to see why the heat was not reaching the radiators. When it became obvious that this task would not be completed in time, the Bears and I took the bus to Crook, where J collected us, and after a quick look round the market took us to the Dairy Barn: pleasant food (not exclusively dairy) and a spectacular view over the Wear valley. We were just preparing to embark on the return journey when

durham_rambler arrived, so J went off to her Italian class and the rest of us settled down for the second sitting.

Then home to recuperate before the Bears caught their southbound train.

durham_rambler's brother (another D.) and sister-in-law (M.) are in between some impressive holidays, and are filling the gap with a short tour of friends and relations in the UK. They fitted us in between an old friend in Easingwold, and a couple of days on Lindisfarne (just because). We had a couple of evenings together, and the day in between - long enough for a lot of chat, a bottle or so of wine and a visit to the cathedral.

It was Sunday, so access to the cathedral itself was restricted. We cut across the west end of the nave, on our way out to the the cloisters; I just had time to photograph this detail of some Restoration woodwork:

It's part of the casing of the old "Father Smith" organ, relocated when the organ was replaced.

Rather than dodge the worshippers in the cathedral, we wanted to visit the cathedral's museum, which currently houses an exhibition around Magna Carta. Durham owns the only surviving copy of the 1216 issues of the Charter (the year after the original, and restating it after the original was rescinded) plus, if I have this right, two copies of the definitive 1225 issue.

( More than you want to know about the museum... )

We left the cathedral through the College. At the gateway into the Bailey we met a man in military dress, crisp knaki and cockade in his beret, studying the notices, and

durham_rambler asked if we could help.
Was this, he asked, Saint Nicholas' cathedral?
Durham cathedral is dedicated to Saint Cuthbert, and I told him so.
No, he definitely wanted Saint Nicholas.
Well, the church in the Market Place is Saint Nick's, would that do?
He didn't seem all that sure, but he asked for directions, and we pointed him along the Bailey towards the Market Place.
We were heading towards the Market Place ourselves, and before we got there we met our friend coming back (very much more briskly than we were going). He had found someone to solve his conundrum for him: he wanted Newcastle cathedral. (I should have thought of that).

We had a late lunch at Turkish Kitchen in Saddler Street: new to me, but would go again. Excellent bread, and a glass of pinot grigio rosé. M's halloumi salad was enormous: she boxed up most of the salad part, and we all shared it for dinner.

We are home, and to mark that occasion, here's a post to close the loop of the holiday narrative: not, I hope, the last of the holiday posts, but the first and the last photos I took on the trip, before I even try to make some order of the several hundred photos I took in between.

Exhibit A: view from above (from, in fact, the queue to use the facilities, but you probably didn't want to know that) of the porch of the 'Last Café in England' (at Rochester in Redesdale). That's the A68, the road north snaking past it...

Exhibit B: Watermelon salad at Mainstreet Trading in the Scottish Borders. Driving home on a blazing hot day, and thank goodness for air conditioning, this was the perfect lunch. Recipe to the best of my guess: cubes of watermelon marinated in an oil and (wine?) vinegar dressing with a generous quantity of chopped mint, and the finest possible slivers of red onion. A few slices of olive and sprinkle with crumbled feta. My personal preference might be to go easier on the onion and up the quantities of olive and feta, but yours might not. At first I thought there was tomato in the salad, but no, all the red was melon; it might be worth experimenting there. The crispy flatbread was good in itself, but I'd have liked something softer to soak up the juices...

Yes, both first an last photos are lunch-stop pictures - the holiday starts and ends on the road.

Two recent articles in The Guardian, each with echoes and source material:

Saturday's article reports that the University of Leeds has bought A pamflyt compiled of Cheese, contayninge the differences, nature, qualities and goodnes, of the same, a handwritten booklet from the sixteenth century, the earliest known book about British (I suspect that's 'English') cheese. Checking back to the online version of the article reveals that they had already published this news a year ago. But since that time, the copy of the 'pamflyt' uploaded to the University's website has been transcribed. So it's worth repeating.

A few days later came an article on bakery tourism: people who travel implausible distances to sample the products of a particular bakery. I like this idea: not so much having such refined taste that you have to cross the Pennines to buy your sourdough, as planning something special as the endpoint of a journey you will enjoy anyway. The article describes this a a pilgrimage (though it says it in Korean, which is classy); and (despite anything I may recently have been saying to the contrary) I like this idea of pilgrimage as a journey with a purpose, and it seems as reasonable to plan your holiday around bakeries as around restaurants - and if you wanted to do that, there is a guide book (which the Guardian duly name-checks, but does not offer to sell through its bookshop). I'm tempted, even though many of the treats described are too sweet for me: I want what the article starts out by invoking, "the perfect loaf or croissant," not "[your] signature 'croissant bomb' - a crispy outer filled with chocolate or hazelnut or salted caramel."

Or maybe I shoud just go to Denmark, where they are apparently having a rye bread revival.

What I learned on yesterday's trip to the greengrocer: that offered the first of the English asparagus for £5, and a punnet of Belgian strawberries, also for £5, I don't need to think about it; I'll have the asparagus. There will be other strawberries, but asparagus comes and goes too fast. We shared them at lunch time, six stubby little fingers, boiled for five minutes maximum, bright green and tender, with a nob of butter.

Thinking about posting this, in the middle of the night when your thoughts go off the tracks, I wanted a word for "things you buy at the greengrocer's" and couldn't think of one. You buy groceries at the grocer's, but what do you buy at the greengrocer's? Well, fruit and veg, I suppose (or maybe fruitandveg). And come to think of it, what are groceries, anyway? "the food and supplies sold by a grocer", says Merriam-Webster, which is pretty circular. Are groceries always plural, or can you buy just one grocery? I think a grocery is the shop itself, rather than, say, a single tin of beans...

I fell asleep before I reached any conclusion.

Half a month into the year, the daylight lasts until teatime and the students are returning: but I feel as if nothing has happened yet. Alternatively, as if so much has happened that I will never manage to fit them all into this post - but all the things that have happened are tiny things, or things that should have happened but didn't.

Two things that didn't happen:

The weekend weather was so icy that S. decided not to come to Durham for the meeting (she said she couldn't face the hill down from the station, and I can't blame her); so she didn't drop in for tea / coffee afterwards. The previous weekend we had missed her party because of the snow: I hope this is not going to be the pattern of the year.

Despite the thaw, I am not at the pub quiz tonight: durham_rambler has gone without me. On Monday evening I started sneezing explosively, and blamed the pepper I had been grinding into the cheese sauce (pepper has that effect on me these days; it never used to). But I haven't stopped sneezing since, so I think it must be a cold. I don't feel terrible, but I don't want to share it with a crowded pub, so I am spending the evening at home. I feel a bit flat, missing yet another social occasion, but I have Dreamwidth and the glass of whisky I would have drunk at the pub (only better whisky), so things could be worse.

Administrative things:

The builders came, and measured the windows; they also examined the dormer window in my study, and pronounced it basically sound (phew!) but promised to look at it from the outside once the scaffolding was up, because once you are paying for scaffolding, it's silly not to make use of it. durham_rambler's study looks great after all the work he did to free up access to the window: so light and spacious! The sitting room looks less great, because the boxes of books which were stacked under the window (and therefore behind the sofa) are now ranged in full view. But they have been vacuumed, and much dust removed.

One item of my prescription had fallen down the gap between the doctor and the pharmacy: it took durham_rambler two visits and a phone call to the pharmacy to work this out. The good news is that it's nothing life-threatening, just some analgesic gel; the bad news is that I may now have squeezed the last drop out of the tube.

I need to submit my Income Tax return before the end of the month: it shouldn't be a big job, but it's always the next thing I need to do after... I think I have cleared away the dayjob tasks, and it now really is the next thing I need to do.

Good things (in the kitchen):

It was not my plan to bake the first loaf of the year on that icy cold Saturday, and I worried that it wouldn't rise (or wouldn't have time to rise). But I had rescued my sourdough starter from the freezer, and restarted it, which is the procedure that works for me if I need to take a break; and now it was demanding attention, and there was no bread in the house, so needs must. I made a rye loaf, which rose only minimally in the tin, but made up for that in the oven. It's still quite dense, but that's how I like my bread, chewy and full of flavour.

Back in the autumn, our neighbour A. gave us two big bags of cooking apples from her tree: I have been working my way through them ever since. We have had apple crumbles, an apple pie, stewed apples, pork and apples and red cabbage slaw with an apple in it. It wasn't until there were only three apples left that I thought of baked apples. My childhood memories of these aren't great, fighting to scrape the sour flesh from the tough skin - but A.'s apples were quite sweet, so maybe if I cooked them for a long time, and was generous with the mincemeat to stuff the core (I will not tell you the 'best before' date on the jar of mincemeat I found in the cupboard, but I don't believe it anyway: surely mincemeat improves with keeping?)... This stategy proved entirely successful: the skin was crisp and slightly charred, the flesh fluffy and sweet. I am a convert.

Trivia, but my mind feels tidier for having put it in writing.

The mystery of the shortbread has been solved: it was dispatched by the two Great-Nephews. They appear to have decided that they are grewn-up enough to send us presents on their own account just at the point where we had decided that they were old enough not to do Christmas presents any more...

There are several more shiny packages in the sitting room, waiting for us to declare that it's present opening time: just now we are savouring the anticipation.

There was a card in the doormat when we got up this morning - posted, nit hand-delivered. Presimably it arrived yesterday, late. Anyway, it's a good one (made by the sender).

durham_rambler declared that he wanted turkey for his Christmas dinner, and that it didn't have to be a whole one. So we bought a turkey crown from M&S, which will provide ample leftovers for two people. Whole we were in M&S,

durham_rambler spotted the pigs in blankets, and declared that these, too, would be very acceptable. So all I have to do is the vegetables, which may be why I have the illusion of time on my hands on Christmas morning - though I think there will be the usual challenge of fitting everything into the oven...

Time to peel some parsnips, I think.

The Wine Society has been celebrating its 150th birthday by commissioning a series of wines which reflect different eras in its history. We haven't been moved to order any of them, but I have enjoyed reading about all the choices which this involved. In the current mailing, the series reaches its conclusion with not the last but the next fifty years: what wines will we be drinking in the future? Short answer: wines grown sustainably, using resilient hybrids, at high altitudes or in new regions (or England).

There are, of course, accompanying recipes. The future of food will be plant-heavy, with a focus on local produce. I wouldn't argue with that, but I was tickled to see that two out of their three recipes feature carlin peas. Chef Paula McIntyre explains that there is a Lancashire tradition of eating carlin peas on Bonfire Night; my father used to talk about them as a tradition of his north-eastern childhood, when they were eaten on Passion Sunday, two Sundays before Easter. Carlin, Palm and Pace-Egg Day... (More here.)

I have seen the future, and it is not what I expected.

But then, there are aspects of the present I still think of as living in the future: which presumably makes me a person from the past. On Friday

durham_rambler was deep in WhatsApp conversation with the rest of the pubquiz team (I have a dumb phone, which makes phone calls, and leave the smart stuff to

durham_rambler, who enjoys it); they were trying to organise a farewell dinner for a departing member. And really I should not be surprised that one of the contributors to the conversation was in Buenos Aires at the time. It did slightly take the futuristic gloss off the situation that he was trapped in a lift in Buenos Aires. (He was released within a couple of hours, and the hotel gave him free breakfasts for a week.)

ETA (02.10.24) Our Gardening Correspondent adds:

In spring [a friend from Whitley Bay] handed me some seed packets she had bought at a Heritage Seed Event. These included a pack of The Carlin Pea, which she said was of local historical interest. Beamish celebrate Carlin Sunday when they tell of the peas saving the population of Newcastle from starvation under siege in 1644.

I grew them. They wouldn't have saved us this year. Germination was poor. I had intended them to be planted out into a raised bed but those that did germinate did not look strong. I grew them in two pots on the patio & gave them lots of attention. In due course we podded them & had them for tea.

As with many heritage varieties I was interested but not that impressed. I can usually tell why heritage varieties have gone out of favour.

There you go.

Instead of paying our monthly visit to Sedgefield for the Farmers' Market yesterday, we went to the Seaham Food Festival: the right choice, I think, since we saw several people there who we might otherwise have expected to see in Sedgefield.

( A preliminary grumble, which I will hide behind a cut, so as not to spoil the atmosphere. )

We had a pleasant, sociable morning, talking to stallholders who recognise us, and stallholders who sort-of half recognised us, but weren't sure where from, and - this was a surprise - an ex-colleague (both of us now ex, since she has been made redundant by our once-shared employer. We agreed that they couldn't possibly manage without her).

I was restrained in my purchases, partly because the festival still suffers from multiple vendors of the same thing: with the best will in the world, there's a limit to how many scotch eggs we need. I'm not a gin-drinker, and I managed to resist most of the many sugar-based treats on offer: we bought some pasteis de nata, and a jar of gooseberry jam (hooray!) but resisted the Grasmere gingerbread and the flapjacks and the fudge and the macarons... Actually, I wasn't particularly tempted to buy the macarons, but I would have loved to photograph them: so many colours! But I'm self-conscious about photographing shop displays from which I don't want to buy; I will never make a street photographer.

So the photo of the day is of a particularly exuberant flower bed:

An interesting article in Saturday's Guardian describes a trend to produce and sell specialty sugars in the same way as the various dofferent specialty salts on the market (the pink Himalayan crystrals, the carefully harvested sea salt...). If there were any hope that the single origin products so temptingly descibed might lead to sugar becoming something to use with discernment, as sparingly as other spices, instead if a cheap bulking agent, I'd be a lot more interested.

But the article is in the paper's Environment section, not Food or Health. It acknowledges a downside to sugar, but only one:

Sugar production has an ugly past. About 5 million slaves were brought to the Caribbean, most to toil on sugar plantations starting in the mid-1500s. The slave trade reached its height in the 1700s, and Barbados, known as Sugar Island, was its crown jewel. Abolitionists in Europe and the US waged boycotts of sugar, a slave-derived good that represented abhorrent working conditions.

For even a vestigial awareness of the damage sugar does in the present to our national diet, you have to go to the Feast supplement. Feel free to insert here the tradional rant about how Feast caters to every dietary exclusion but one, or just skip straight to the back pages, where Grace Dent has her finger on the pulse:

Apple Butter Cafe, which recently opened a second branch at the top of London's Regent Street, is very much a cafe of its time. Today's young may be eschewing the vices of yesteryear - booze, ciggies, drugs, etc - but their Achilles heel is sugar. Build a cafe that serves short stacks of chunky, fat pancakes smothered in banoffee syrup and topped with mini meringues, shards of tempered chocolate, quenelles of thick cream and microplaned lemon zest, and they will come. Post a video on TikTok of someone blowtorching said pancake stack, so the meringue browns and gives the whole hot mess a baked alaska vibe, however, and your customers will queue from 8am for the chance to make their own content next to the fake plastic trees "growing" inside the cafe.

And since these are the people who write my daily paper, their blind spot is apparent in its pages.

I eventually baked some hot cross buns on Easter Sunday, so we had them for breakfast on Monday - which is still Easter, isn't it? So, not too late (it's never too late for buns!). And J. had called on Good Friday with a couple of buns of her own baking, so we had already had buns on Saturday. J. had apparently never made hot cross buns before, and she had gone to the trouble of making pastry crosses to decorate the tops - which added an interesting crunch, but goodness, how fiddly!

I had already discarded a batch of sourdough (all bar a spoonful to seed the next batch), so I was relieved to be back on schedule.

I made Felicity Cloake's saffron buns: last time I did this, I thought the saffron and cardamom were overpowered by the other spices, so this time I didn't add any other spices. The dough smelled amazing, but not much of that survived the baking. But I leaned into the golden theme: I didn't have any candied peel, so I substituted candied pineapple, and threw in a handful of chopped pistachio nuts. The result was good, but next year I think I'll go back to the traditional spice buns.

I'd make the golden buns again, though. I love saffron. In fact, and I hadn't planned this, I used it twice on Sunday, because I also made paëlla for dinner.

Watching any pasta shape being extruded, be that through a small domestic machine or a vast industrial one, is hypnotic. Short shapes are particularly mesmerising, because the dough - made from durum wheat flour and water - emerges at speed from the bronze or Teflon-coated die, and is then chopped to size by a rotating blade. And then there are fusilli, whose helix form is created by an ingenious die that was invented and perfected in the early 1900s. Fusilli twist their way into being, the Syd Barrett of pasta shapes, emerging from the die in a psychedelic spiral.

Rachel Roddy, Guardian Feast, 30.03.2024

We will not be eating haggis tonight, Burns Night though it is. It's not for want of trying. Ocado had no haggis when I placed my last order; or rather, they offered only vegetarian haggis, and at the time I thought I could do better.

Yesterday morning we went into Durham. I had some errands to do at the market, and I thought that buying a haggis would be one of them. The cheese stall (in former times my usual supplier, but now under different management) could not help, and the butcher's stall has vanished completely. Luckily the watch stall was able to refit the pin that secures my watch strap, so the trip wasn't wasted. But neither the supermarket nor the fancy new deli could help me. So there will be smoked mackerel kedgeree for dinner, and very nice too.

And here's a picture from last summer's holiday in Galloway, from Annan's old harbour area:

Rigby's Encyclopaedia of the Herring has much weird and wonderful information about fasting on Fridays (and other herring-related subjects).

On Saturday we visited the Banqueting House at Gibside, our one indulgence in this year's Heritage Open Days. In other yeaars we have scheduled an entire weekend of visits, but this year it has pretty much passed us by.

durham_rambler received a notification that visits to the Banqueting House could be booked, and he booked them, but we failed to investigate what else was on offer...

We know the Banqueting House of old, but only from the outside. It is a Gothic Folly on the Gibside estate, which was one of our favourite winter walks, in the days when we spent our Sundays walking; there's a splendid vista across the Octagon Pond, up to the ridiculous spiky building framed by woodland. In the eighteenth century, guests could be brought here and given refreshments (presumably brought up from the house by the servants); now it has been renovated, restored, transformed by the Landmark Trust, and you can stay there. It would be a cosy refuge for two, but Landmark market it for four, which they achieve by putting two single beds into the sitting room. Even assuming that the four and parents and children (or very good friends indeed), since access to the bathroom (shower) is through the bedroom, off one side of the main room, and access to the toilet is through the kitchen off the other side of the main room - I'm not saying you couldn't make it work, but it would reduce the elegance of the experience:

J., who is becoming a real Landmark fan, accompanied us on this outing, and has loaned us her microwave, her steamer and her hot-air fryer. So I am learning to use these devices, and we have hot food. The microwave seems the most versatile - and so it should, because it takes up a lot of counter space, and had better earn it. On Saturday I cooked potatoes and corgettes and bits of chorizo in the hot-air fryer, but since then I've used it mostly to make toast: toast and coffee for breakfast is essential, but I don't think I'm making the most of its capabilities. We spent Sunday afternoon with S., celebrating her birthday, which involves constant snacking, so on Sundaayy evening we had soup, which I heated in the microwave. I have also fried eggs in the microwave. It's all very exciting.

The gas engineer is due tomorrow, and it's not impossible that he will be able to reconnect us. But then, he was due today and rescheduled, so I am trying not to get my hopes up.

A beautiful summer evening yesterday, clear and bright and still, and we went to Cullercoats for the launch of Ann Cleeves' new murder mystery, The Raging Storm.

The event was upstairs at the club, so we went to the Salt House next door for something to eat beforehand. I vaguely remember it as a burger joint, but it seems to have converted itself to a tapas bar. My usual experience with tapas is that there's something I really enjoy, and something else which I don't order, and wish I had: last night that was the chicken thighs with a creamy bean sauce, and the crab, respectively. A large glass of macabeo was plenty to see me through the evening, and I was happy not to have to contend with the queue at the bar (though

durham_rambler, who had been abstemious with the wine, was disappointed).

Because yes, although we arrived at the club maybe a minute or so before the doors were scheduled to open, there was already a queue, and it took all of the half hour between then and the formal start time - and more - to get everyone into their seats. Which is very satisfactory, not only for the author, and the bookshop who organised it, but also for the RNLI: the book is dedicated to them, and the evening was a benefit event. Having already read the book, I knew that there was a connection there - the lifeboat is involved in the discovery of the first body (I don't think it's a spoiler to say that there's more than one murder...). But Ann had some stories to tell during the Q & A session which I hadn't heard before, including a daring lifeboat rescue off the island of Hillbre...

So that was fun, and then we drove home through deepening twilight: the sea still and luminous on our left, the moon hanging above us like a perfect lemon wedge in the sky.

Damsons from the greengrocer; blackberries from the garden.

Salon des refusés: dark but not exactly black fruits:

An outsize aubergine from the greengrocer; 2015 Gigondas from the wine cellar.

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The Shadow Gallery

March 2026

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with food

The evergreen equivalent of carrying personal defence spray

Five things make a week (compressed)

Fish book / book festival / [fish]

Time flies...

Tourists at home

Last and First

Bread and cheese, and more bread and cheese

Green/grocer/ies

A mid-January post

Christmas Day

Days of future past

Market by the sea

Sweets for my sweet

Saffron Sunday

Shine on, you crazy helix

For a' that, and for a' that ...

Fish for Friday

Banquets and other culinary adventures

The calm and the storm

Black fruit season