Changes
How a house move can lead to a renewed relationship with food.
I haven’t been here in a while. A summer occupied by a house move forced me to reset in many areas of my life. The omnipresence and importance of food and creation in the kitchen obviously followed.
I moved from my small two-bedroom London flat in June and ensured the boxes stacked in the kitchen of our new home; a cosy worker’s cottage in St Albans, were unpacked first. I drew diagrams on scraps of paper of the new kitchen layout and mentally stacked plates in front of bowls and visa versa before getting everything sorted and unpacked. We lost numerous plates and cups in the move, a suitable amount of collateral for a couple I think.
My Kitchenaid and the coffee machine were in pride of place before my sofa had its legs reattached; a symbol of our priorities. I recognise this sounds like I was making hand-rolled pasta on our first night in the house. Unfortunately, no. The exhaustion and stress of the move resulted in a late lunch of a grilled cheese from Five Guys and a rocky road treat sent by my wonderful Mum from a local dessert cafe. We ate out of the paper bags on the sofa (still without it’s legs) and wondered out loud about the layout of the living room while chasing chunks of marshmallow in our rocky road.
Within a week of sleeping in a new bedroom and going through the repetitive motions of unpacking and collapsing what seemed like hundreds of cardboard boxes, I decided to wake early before work and go for a walk. Our proximity to the old Roman city of Verulamium, now covered by a beautiful park, was too tempting. I wandered along the lake and along the hedgerows, bumping in to an egret amongst the tall grasses and traipsing across an open expanse of field in the direction of the old Roman wall. I made the walk a habit, 30-45 minutes every morning before I did anything else, accompanied by an audiobook or a podcast.
A couple of weeks into July I made my way over to Sopwell Ruins, remains of a medieval nunnery. The ruins stand alone in a clearing lined with hogweed and brambles and parallel to a small area of wetland. I quickly discovered and mentally mapped a route from my home that gave me ample access to rich blackberry bushes studded with the little black jewels that needed only the slightest of pressure to burst its purple dye onto my fingers. I suddenly remembered the really lovely walks to my local park that my Dad used to take us on every year towards the end of Summer. Mum would have passed on requirements for blackberries; enough to accompany apples in a crumble with some leftover to make jam. Over the next few days I brought a freezer bag with me on my walks and found the best ways to scan bushes for the hidden gems. On each one of these walks I managed to acquire a sting across a phalange, a small reminder from the woods to only take what I needed and to leave enough for the birds and insects. Each collection involved a negotiation with the spiders that seemed to be the true owners of the brambles, a one-sided conversation that demanded I only go as far as their guard-posts.
On my return to the house I always soaked my berries in water and a drop of white vinegar so that I could remove any small bugs that had emerged in the water. I have frozen most of the berries with plans to make apple and blackberry jam to retain that flavour of warm evenings and sun-soaked leaves into the winter. Before those plans I managed to squeeze in enough to make a bottle of blackberry vinegar. Well, kind of. There was no fermentation process involved. I soaked 500g fresh blackberries in an equal weight of apple cider vinegar in the fridge for a week before straining, adding sugar and simmering for 10 minutes. The vinegar is now waiting to be made into a deliciously fruity salad dressing.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been treated to a full harvest of elderberries. Hanging in shining clusters from the trees along my walks, I have collected enough to make a syrup that will hopefully keep Autumn and Winter colds at bay.
My new garden has also opened up opportunities for me to learn more about the food I eat. I must warn readers; I am not a natural gardener. While most of what I do in the kitchen is fairly intuitive and based on how I can use up various ingredients I have lying around, any green-fingered experiments I took up in London were limited at best. We were able to cultivate a fantastic compost pile but not much more than a few small tomatoes and a sunflower in the yard of my London home. A new garden lined with jasmine, honeysuckle and raspberry plants inspired me to make the beds my own. With the guidance of Nancy Birtwhistle’s “The Green Gardening Handbook”, I planted strips of beetroot and lettuce into my beds and recycled a wooden pallet into a stacked herb garden. I realised, much too late, that I should have thinned my potted carrots out and am in a persistent stand off with a one-eyed stray cat who likes to sleep and poop underneath the rose bushes but my education continues.
While cleaning up the garden in the first few days after the move I opened the Weber kettle BBQ nestled underneath the jasmine to find it was virtually new and unused. Being completely new to cooking over open fire, I did some minimal research and grilled a spatchcocked chicken rubbed in paprika and thyme in the early evening of one of the hottest days of the year. I chopped up a sweetheart cabbage, popped it into a roasting tray and placed it beneath the chicken over the heat which resulted in a schmaltzy and smokey side for an easy roast.
Next week I’ll write about the places I’ve tried in my new neighbourhood. Who knew that St Albans and the surrounding area have a thriving bagel scene?
Absolutely lovely to read this again, keep them coming xx