Left on the shelf: Where culinary dreams go to die
THE other night I tried a recipe from vegetarian queen Anna Jones’s new book Easy Wins. Dishing up our usual steak and baked potatoes would have been easier, but lured by the delicious sounding recipes and tempting photos, I decided to break from our normal routine and go for something Oriental – black bean Nasi Goreng, if you’re interested.
So it is that our kitchen cupboard is now crammed with even more items to accompany the ones already languishing there. Rice wine vinegar, umami and miso pastes now sit side by side with sesame oil, star anise, garam masala and turmeric, loitering there until they pass their sell-by dates and are chucked out.
Store cupboards are depositories of abandoned projects. Looking through the contents, it’s easy to see those moments when my culinary ambition flared, before subsiding back into plain roast chicken and frozen peas.
And our obsession with cookery books has only fuelled the number of new ingredients that, in the full flush of enthusiasm, seem as essential as salt and pepper. On our shelves there are preserved lemons and rose water from my Ottolenghi moments, and the coconut milk and red lentils to remind me of the occasional Indian dish from Meera Sodha.
There’s also a collection of debris from failed diets, most recently the Zoom regime, which found me buying industrial quantities of chia seeds, cranberries, chickpeas, linseed and flax, which sit there as another sad reproach to my inability to stick to my ambitions.
Slugs are heroes now? Tell my tulips
PESTS have become even more complicated than I thought. We’ve always had a moth problem, with our knits invariably shredded by the blighters despite all kind of cedar wood, lavender sachets and even nasty toxic sprays in the wardrobe. But I gather we have things pretty easy. Others not only have to contend with moths but woolly bear, the carpet beetle larvae that feast on feathers and furs, and booklice, which attack books. And then there’s the question of slugs, now heralded as a gardener’s best friend. You can tell that to my tulips, which have had to be guarded with chicken wire. Moths make lace out of cashmere, but slugs and snails do the same to my plants. I will need more convincing before I stop gathering them up and chucking them into the park across the road.