Officially a heatwave, with one record-breakingly hot May day immediately followed by another one, and we find ourselves in not quite the hottest part of it finishing the construction of my mother’s prefab compost bins out of posts and boards that turn out, in the preceding days of rain and hail and then record-breaking heat, to have warped rather badly and need hammering into place rather than slotting neatly together as they should; I am glad we building it next to the hedge, despite unwanted attention from the brambles and nettles, as even in the shade sweat is beading down my forehead to drip down my nose and off into the soil, the sun above like a fever. That done I don’t have a great deal of energy for anything else, certainly not to trim all the grass that needs trimming or to weed all the weeds that need weeding; I scrabble and rootle a few holes in bare soil to sow saved seeds of cucumber Middle East Peace, climbing bean Marvel of Venice and borlotti of some kind, and I pick a big bagful of the larger broad beans, the first glut of the year, at least the same again still swelling on the plants and no sign yet (touch wood, ward off the evil eye) of blackfly. I cut the first few little artichokes and pull up a stem of green garlic to go with them, although unfortunately there is no asparagus ready to make a little home-grown vignarola. The bed needs a good water, to be honest, which I do not do - not because it is too hot at this time of day to water (although it absolutely is) but just because I completely forget, thoughts frazzled by the heat

.

in the kitchen

Because of the heat (did I mention the heat?) I have been thinking about dinners which either don’t need the oven on or which can be baked and then left to go tepid while we go out for a walk and the flat cools down. One day we have a warmish salad of charred cauliflower, bulghur wheat and gem lettuce with slices of fried halloumi, the next I decide to make a quiche / flan (I make it in a rectangular enamel pie dish and it’s quite deep, with thick pastry, which feels like it disqualifies it from proper quiche-hood) with leeks and bacon and comté and cheddar (English cheese surely disqualifies it from quiche-hood) and Parmesan, which we have with a big salad (more gem, shredded red cabbage and carrot) and little glasses of cold fizzy wine. I’m testing passatelli for an event we’re doing on Saturday, both the recipe for the dough and the use of an electric meat grinder to shape the fat worms of breadcrumb and eggs and cheese, so we’ll have those for dinner; just a pan of boiling water required, and a little pan to cook some of my allotment broad beans for the condimento.

on the page

If I’m honest the flan / quiche was inspired not just by the weather but also by Thea Everett’s Substack post from 3 years ago which somehow came to my attention and especially by reading Theresa Präauer’s Cooking In The Wrong Century (translated by Eleanor Updegraff), a strange little novel about hosting and socialising and hospitality which tells the story of an intimate dinner party in stops and starts, rewinding and replaying the evening with variations minor and major (one guest or another is fashionably late, embarrassingly late, charming, rude, it wraps up early, it goes on late, the police arrive, is there an orgy?) but which all involve the same menu, centred on a classic Quiche Lorraine for which you could pick up the recipe, if you wanted to, dotted around on pages between chapters / retellings, bacon, leek & onion, gruyere (they didn’t have gruyere at Tesco hence my comté), eggs, cream, pastry enriched unlike mine with an egg, and around several bottles of crémant, cheaper than Champagne, chicer than the supermarket prosecco we had with ours.

T-shirt weather, at last, and time to cut back the grass and pull the weeds that have shot up and around in the two weeks I have been away, the creeping buttercup trying to take back the asparagus bed, the nettles interspersed with the artichoke leaves, vetch and plantain coming up next to two hazelnut striplings between the clusters of wild garlic, collapsing now into the earth to wait for next spring. I strim the grass as close as I can, leave clumps of clover as they are (good for the soil, I think, and they would be good for pigs too, if this were an ideal mixed smallholding and not a council allotment), cover the weeds in the asparagus over with a layer of compost, pull some up from around the onions - grass, thistle, dandelion - and throw them back down to cover the bare soil between the rows of potatoes, themselves still half-covered in the rhubarb leaves & comfrey my mother put down to protect against the forecast frost; the cold seems to have got to the asparagus, one spear half-dead with the same green limpness you get in vegetables pushed to the back of the fridge, frozen and stuck. I am about halfway down my plot when it begins to rain, although it passes in five minutes, and halfway through another task (helping my mother put together a compost bin) when it begins to hail. Even though this too passes fairly quickly, when it stops it is no longer T-shirt weather and the warm earth is turned into sticky clay; I abandon all thoughts of picking elderflowers and try a bit more strimming, the grass steaming in the sudden sun. We are right on the edge of the gluts of summer, the broad beans heavy with pods not quite filled out, the artichokes full of flowerbuds just peeking out, if you dodge the nettles and fold aside the giant thistle’s silver leaves.

in the kitchen

While I was away I was mostly being cooked for - and cooked for very well - which is never something to complain about, but it was pleasant after a week to meet up with our friends Rachel and Gaia and go shopping in Testaccio market with not much more of a plan than something-with-mussels and let’s-see-what-looks-good, which resulted in asparagus and peas and lovely fresh onions and apricots and cherries and a morning sat together podding peas and picking mussels and chopping things and drinking coffee and trying some mortadella and some cheese before a lunch of

a loose risotto of asparagus and peas, like risi e bisi but with asparagus and without ham

a tiella of mussels, rice, and potatoes (recipe testing for Rachel)

mussels stuffed with breadcrumbs and celery (recipe testing for us)

boiled asparagus with melted butter

cherries afterwards, to be shared with the tortoise

and I thought again how nice it is to have a big table in the same place as the cooking is being done, so that it is shared like this, the kitchen the centre of the house instead of banished somewhere backstage.

on the page

My usual habit when I travel is to buy two or three paperbacks from the WH Smiths at the airport (depending on whether they are doing three for the price of two or buy one get one half price) to read throughout my holiday or just at the airport if the plane is delayed enough; in an effort to spend less money I went instead to the charity bookshop the day before flying and was pleased to find what I thought was a Natalia Ginzburg novel that hadn’t yet been released in the current run of new editions from Daunt Books; it was only after reading quite a few pages (in my defence, I was very tired) that I realised that that The Things We Used To Say was in fact an older and rather freer (at least in its title) translation of Lessico Famigliare, which I had read before as Family Lexicon in Jenny McPhee’s translation. A somewhat disorientating experience, to read almost the same book again, to be distracted by its differences in vocabulary and exposition, shocked again by the book’s quiet heartbreak, the understatement of its trauma.

Still not that much to do, at this time of the year, except to do what you can to keep the things that you do not want to grow from overwhelming the things that you do - the creeping buttercup, teasels, thistles, nettles coming in from everywhere, grass coming in from the pathways and the patches between beds to colonise the open soil - and to keep the things that you do want to grow in the places you are trying to grow them in, to stop the brambles and raspberries from sending out shoots and suckers everywhere, the fennel from seeding itself in the most unlikely places; no, not much to do except to take the strimmer round the plot and see what is happening and where - the bear’s garlic flowering and going to seed, the currants in bud, the blackberries not doing much of anything (the yearly panic as to whether I pruned away the right branches or not), the garlic plumping up nicely, the broad beans in full flower and looking very happy, swaying in the wind against their loose support of twine and bamboo. I see the first ant crawling up one of the stalks and take that as my cue to pinch out the tops, the dense little clusters which can harbour the aphids the ants farm and which also (suitably washed of insect life) make very good little fritters, a simple tempura batter and hot oil and salt and lemon. I cut a big bunch of the fennel I am now fairly sure is Sicilian fennel grown from some of the seed we were given as a wedding gift rather than self-seeded with the rest, and I cut the two (two!) stalks of asparagus which are up, but leave all the nettles where they are; next week I am doing a residency in Abruzzo around the theme of nettles and will have (I assume) my fill of them.

in the kitchen

Although my own broad bean tops are still sitting in the fridge in a plastic bag we did make fritters last week as described above with broad bean tops from the community gardens and had them for a light dinner as wraps in fluffy pitta with salad also from the community gardens, spring onions and mayo (tahini or yoghurt would have been better but we didn’t have them), hot crunchy oily leaves against cool crunchy lemony leaves, very satisfying. The big bunch of fennel once blanched in boiling water and drained and squeezed and finely chopped turned into a small fistful of fennel to add to sausagemeat and onion and stew down for a pasta sauce; the two stalks of asparagus will probably form part of a breakfast tomorrow or the day after, maybe with the broad bean tops in a frittata although I have just remembered that I have forgotten to buy eggs and we are out. I like this time of the year when the plot produces these little harvests, enough for a seasoning or an accent here and there; soon enough the broad beans will provide the first of the year’s gluts (if you don’t count the nettles) and the allotment will begin to dictate what we eat and preserve and put in the freezer - as it should do.

on the page

In between trying to read my way through all the books I got for my birthday (John & Paul which was lovely, a book about the Venetian publishing industry which was very interesting if comically full of typos for a book about the publishing industry, Elizabeth Alker’s book about contemporary classical music and pop which I am about a third through and am enjoying immensely) I picked up a short book from my bookshelf called In The Pines or possibly in the pines, a book which I had bought ages ago for some reason I forget (I imagine I picked it up initially for the Lead Belly / Nirvana reference and was then intrigued by the premise) but had left unread until now; as is so often the case I am glad I did so, as I don’t think the past me that originally bought the book would quite have appreciated its blend of fragments of narrative with the evocative photographs which dot the pages, tintype prints taken in the field, neither medium quite illustrating or illuminating the other but instead combining into a peculiar whole.

Although you might still leave the house in glorious sunshine, duck into a shop to avoid a freezing shower, and walk home into a brisk wind - although the weather is still very much fickle the air itself is warm enough and there has been so much rain over the winter that everything now is shooting up tense and green; the broad beans a mass of flowers and buds, the nettles exploding from the hedgerows, the bronze feathers of the fennel in dense little bushes, the lovage beginning its yearly climb from soil-level to the height of my shoulder, and for the first time there are one, two, three, enough spears of asparagus up at the same time to be worth picking and tying into one little bunch. We have nurtured the plants for years, my wife planting the straggly roots in a trench I had dug for them, years of watering and vainly weeding and building up their bed with manure and compost and keeping an eye out for the asparagus beetles that are apparently such a pest. In a probably forlorn attempt to keep the creeping buttercup out of the bed I have raised it up a little with wattled-but-undaubed walls of hazel and willow twigs (freer draining, I thought, which I believe they like), the only bed on my plot to be distinguished in this way, and I am glad that the plants are enjoying their new status, there are more spears on the way, ready for next week perhaps. I realise that I have nowhere to plant the seed potatoes that I bought and left chitting at my mother’s house and slightly begrudgingly dig over the only currently free bed I have, two-thirds of a space partly taken up by the sprawling cardoon and some apparently self-seeded onions. Kneeling in the soil picking stones out of the tilth I am surprised by movement in the plants next to me, a little lizard that several people who know about lizards tell me is a Common Lizard, Zootoca vivipara, who sits calmly for a few photographs before scuttling off into the deeper shade of the cardoon.

in the kitchen

The first asparagus I ate this year was at the newish restaurant Franc in Canterbury, a late birthday lunch with my twin and our partners; for a starter, four spears of asparagus and a dollop of bright green wild garlic hollandaise adorned with the white star of a wild garlic flower and nothing else, exactly how I want to eat the first green shoots of the season - of the year. My own few spears are barely even enough to do this with, and anyway I can’t really see myself making a little plate of asparagus and hollandaise for myself at home. Instead I sauté the chopped-up spears with spring onion and lovage and scramble in a couple of eggs and eat it with a couple of chunks of sourdough. Eggs of course are very good at taking on and somehow stretching out the flavours of things you put with them and so are good for making something approximating a meal out of a little luxury, like the end bit of some good ham, or a scrap of fresh truffle, or the first produce of a long-nurtured asparagus bed.

on the page

I hadn’t read a really good chunky novel for a long time and so I really enjoyed getting my teeth into Q, a cloak-and-dagger blockbuster thriller set during the Reformation and its associated peasant uprisings, written by an Italian anarchist collective under the name of an 1980s footballer, Luther Blissett; perhaps unsurprisingly, Umberto Eco was briefly assumed to be behind the project. There is always something very pleasing about being able to immerse yourself so completely in a book which spans both decades and over 600 pages, and which happily switches between theological nuance, bawdy humour, swashbuckling battles, and a lengthy disquisition on banking and the smoke-and-mirrors nature of money itself.

I am getting more and more interested in non-edible uses of ferments - at home I made another batch of red cabbage sauerkraut (2% salt, some fennel and caraway seed) and put all of the outer leaves and cores and stuff into a crock of water. As their dye seeps out the rapidly souring liquid (uncontrolled by any salt) turns it from purple to a bright pink which does not look natural; reducing the liquid by half fills the flat with the smell of braised cabbage but produces a surprisingly colour-fast ink. The ink also smells of braised cabbage but there’s not much to be done about that. You could get the same effect without fermenting the infusion by adding a bit of vinegar, of course, but I like to see it happen naturally.

I’m still very new to all this - the first I heard anything about fermented vegetable developers was from a filmmaker called Toby Parker Rees who got in touch with me a few years ago to say

“I'd like to make a short portrait film about you and your approach to pickling things. I'd also like to pickle the film.”

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It is sunny, yes, but when the wind blows it is cold, very cold; only yesterday coming back from town I walked into a hailstorm, the picture-frame I was carrying pushing me around like the sails of a windmill. Here the bucket which I had placed over those little stalks of accidentally-forced asparagus has blown off into my next-door neighbour’s plot - I have to retrieve it from among her raised beds, feeling like a trespasser - and one of my chairs has tumbled into the netting protecting my broad beans from rodents. Thankfully nothing is crushed but still I take this as my cue to remove the netting which soon the bean plants will be pushing against, they are long past the stage where a passing mouse might nip straight through their stalk or make off entirely with the seed-bean itself and I do not want to come back in a week and find that the netting was fine enough for aphids to enter but too fine for ladybirds to get in and eat them. The plants are coming into white-and-purple flower and I find myself thinking how good my crop will be, superstitiously forcing the thought from my mind. Other than picking another bagful of nettles there is not much to attend to; there is a big pile of ash on a nearby plot left from a communal weekend session of burning the accumulated prunings of winter, and I scoop some up and sprinkle a little on my compost, a little round the fig tree and around my fruit bushes, and put some in a bottle with some rainwater, for what purpose exactly I’m not sure.

in the kitchen

Now that the weather has been getting warmer I suddenly remember all of the cold-weather cooking I haven’t got around to doing over the winter; the cold winds and smatterings of rain and hail give me an excuse to indulge. Toad-in-the-hole, one day, my second attempt to convince my Italian wife of the validity of this dish (my first attempt, years ago, a sad and lumpen thing of dense and unrisen batter). This one puffs up well but our slightly malfunctioning hob and a moment of inattention on my part burn the gravy I have spent an hour on (slowly slowly caramelising onions, mainly) and so I cannot call it an unqualified success. Rather better is a lasagna made the next day, meatless but with wild garlic pesto and bechamel and twaróg1 cheese in between several layers of pasta, somehow fresh and quite light for a big dish of baked pasta, with lemon-dressed rocket on the side.

on the page

Having a studio to write and mess around with photography in means that I have another space to leave books in and so I now have on the go at any one time

a sofa book (could be anything)

a bedside book (non-fiction)

a backpack book (for reading on the train)

a studio book (research or work related)

and I therefore feel like I am reading very slowly, a chapter here and a chapter there; my bedside book, for example, David Graeber’s Debt, I think I have been reading for over a year. My most recently finished sofa book is Patrick Harpur’s The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, a very readable and occasionally infuriating attempt to recenter the creative imagination within Western thought; the kind of book which (even if you don’t entirely agree with it) sparks resonances everywhere, making you look in a different way at everything else you are reading or watching or that you encounter.

Hi all! As you may have seen on Instagram (perhaps that’s why you’re here!) from September I will be running an online writing course called Grounding Your Words - 8 weekly sessions designed to help you develop your writing practice and build the craft of observation into your fiction or non-fiction.

Each week we’ll look at a different aspect of creative writing craft and use film, images, texts, found objects and the world around us as prompts for short exercises to work on together. Writing can be lonely, all in the head; here is a chance to ground it in collaboration.

For more info and to buy tickets have a look here; for the first week of sales you can get a 10% discount using the code EARLYDOORS at checkout. I hope to see some of you there!

After weeks and months of dormancy suddenly there is so much to do - and for the time being not much to show for it. The grass needs cutting and is finally dry enough to do so; the weeds encroaching from the hedgerows and the grassy spaces between beds are threatening to overrun the plants I am trying to grow; the framework holding the bramble vaguely in place needs remaking, their shoots need tying in, the compost bins need rebuilding, the hazel should have been pruned weeks ago, the patches of earth left fallow over winter now look at me accusingly, ready for turning, to take in new life. Meanwhile the idea of any actual crop is still far off; my wild garlic patch probably needs leaving for another year, and the broad beans which will make the first harvest have yet to even flower. A corner of the sheet of corrugated plastic that has been lying around on the plot since I dried my garlic and onions on it last summer has blown on top of the asparagus bed, and underneath it (sadly somewhat corroded by slugs) two spears of white asparagus have forced themselves up into the dark. Still, nothing seems like a chore when it is warm and when the air smells like this, full of blossom and grass and herbs, when each plant is full enough of life that knocking or kneeling upon one brings up a great heady scent, intoxicating.

in the kitchen

The other week the first crop of nettles - just a tiny bag of shoots - were cooked as planned as creamed nettles to go with a roast chicken, a favourite preparation of greens; just blanch them and then sauté in butter, stir in flour to make a roux, add milk and cream and season with nutmeg as well as salt and black pepper, something between a sauce (in flavour and texture it is not unlike traditional bread sauce) and a side. The chicken was rubbed with rosemary salt, chilli, oregano and lemon zest and roasted on a wire rack over a tray of thickly sliced potatoes with a slick of olive oil until the skin was crispy and the legs pulled away from the body and the potatoes were swimming in chicken juices, browned on top and fudgey underneath; as well as the nettles we had a salad of mixed leaves (heavy on the mustard) from the community gardens. There weren’t quite as many leftovers as I had planned but the bones and skin and bits went into a pot with the usual suspects to make a broth, some of which we froze in an ice cube tray and some of which I made into a soup with thinly sliced leeks and carrots and barley and the leftover chicken, somewhere between a cock-a-leekie and a soup we had once in the Sudtirol of chicken broth and barley and diced carrot and nothing else, perfect for the somewhere-between season we have just left.

on the page

Although I am still trying to read my way through books that I already own rather than acquire any new ones I was lent a couple of proofs to look at, of Rebecca Parry’s May We Feed The King and Rebecca Tamás’ The Book of Mysteries, both of which I had been eagerly anticipating. The first is a strange, elliptical sort of historical novel, shifting between a present day Curator of the displays of food and homewares you get in the museums of castles and stately homes and a presumably-medieval king, a reluctant and improbable (third son, no other heirs) ruler of a realm unnamed and not clearly defined. In fact few of the broader strokes of the book are clearly defined, its characters known only by their titles or job descriptions, the tragedy which has befallen the Curator not clearly spelled out; instead it accumulates itself in fine detail, like the exact prices and construction of the plastic foodstuffs the Curator decorates her sets with. Tamás’ book is marvellous, an attempt to restructure a modern life around something more fundamental than the clock time of 9-5 we have burdened ourselves with, its collision of ancient religion and modern paganism with radical politics and ecological thinking a natural continuation of her essays in Strangers. A slightly off-kilter trip through the calendar, dealing also with the shock of grief, it was hard not to think of it in productive conversation with The Allotment Diaries; several times while reading it I wished I could revisit and rewrite my own book in light of new thoughts, but of course that ship has sailed.

March 19th is also nearly the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and many of the Sicilian venerations have something older and more pagan about them, marking this turning point of the year; three-tiered altars piled high with breads left in sacrifice to the saint to be distributed ultimately to the poor, elaborately shaped and woven to resemble figures, sheafs of wheat, hands, ladders, with baskets of fruits and vegetables, the first harvest of the new season rubbing up with the stored produce of the last. In particular in Sicily they make the maccu or minestra di San Giuseppe, a soup that is also a spell - Mary Taylor Simeti calls it a propitiatory ritual2, an attempt to guarantee this year’s harvest through a deliberate sacrifice of the last. It is a soup that embodies the particular Christian quality of recklessness, of putting one’s faith in Providence, an act of lavish poverty.

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It smells of spring as much as it feels like it, the smell I suppose of pollen drifting in the air, of cut grass, the sharp scent of nettles as you approach the edges of the plot, and it is warm enough to work in just a t-shirt, knees muddy in the soil to - finally, after the torpor of winter - neaten and weed and tidy, pulling patches of chickweed and grass out from among the wild garlic and the bed of sleeping asparagus, tut at the creeping buttercup which spreads its way right through the soil, dump the other weeds back on top in the hope that their shade will choke it out; warm enough when my back starts to ache to just sit a while in the sun and to carry on whittling a length of hazel into something I am thinking of as a pilgrim’s staff. There is frogspawn among the wire netting covering my mother’s pond in her plot next door, birdsong in the hedges and, as I squat to pick a bagful of new nettle tips, the first greens of the year, to blanch and have creamed with roast chicken, the sound in the orchard beyond of an argument between a walker and a dog-walker, who like many dog owners seems to believe that rules about leads and control and so forth apply to every other dog except their own - all the sounds and signs of spring.

in the kitchen

Last week I picked three or so stalks of the rhubarb that was knocking over its blanching bucket and when I got home chopped it and macerated it with sugar and cooked it very gently in a little water, jewel-pink and tender. This is a good sort of preliminary thing to do with rhubarb, it keeps quite well while you are thinking what else you might do with it, but often I get no further than that, unable to decide what exactly should be its final form; a cake, a crumble, stirred through braised pork or duck for a little sweet-sour tang? Luckily my wife is more proactive about such things than I am and goes and buys a pot of cream to whip for a rhubarb fool, sweetened with the syrup from some candied ginger, and some chocolate and ginger biscuits to go with it. This we eat from the little silver ice-cream bowls we keep for eating such things from while watching Small Prophets and I remember how nice whipped cream can be, with some sharp fruit to set it off.

on the page

Sometimes - I am sure I have said this before - sometimes a book you have either bought and left on a shelf or picked up and put down on several occasions at a bookshop suddenly appeals to you and you ferret it out or buy it and realise you are reading it at just the right time, that you would not have really appreciated it as much as you do now had you read it when you first bought it or when it first came out. This happened twice this week, with Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence (picked up and put down on several occasions at a bookshop) and Jane Reichhold’s Writing and Enjoying Haiku, both of which made me think about short bursts of language rather than more lengthy structures in a way I hadn’t consciously done in a while as well as (along with Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, also bought-but-not-read a while ago) how I will go about teaching the craft and practice of writing when I begin to offer classes, as I intend to later this year.

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One really warm, sunny day, and we act as though winter is blown away for ever, that winter of endless rain and grey skies that kept me skulking indoors for most of February. Now here on a cooler day, with vague gusts of rain or really just damp air threatening, you can see the warmth coming through the soil, everything pushing upwards, awake at last after winter’s torpor; the broad beans are big and sturdy, fluttering in the wind, some onions I don’t remember planting have appeared in the fallow bed next to the cardoon, and the upturned bucket I had placed over my rhubarb has been knocked sideways by the growth of the stalks upwards in search of light. Spring, yes, spring is here, it seems, with all of its hope and its plans, but as I dig a whole to plant out a little pot of lemonbalm I see how the wet winter is still there in the soil, the heavy clumps of clay which come out and stick to everything, gloves and tools and trousers. Patience, a little longer, first let the daffodils pass and the nettles run riot and hope that the sun persists.

in the kitchen

Away from the daily routine of a restaurant kitchen I find it is very easy to get into a habit of not cooking, I never really eat breakfast anyway and lunch can be a bought sandwich or something eaten on the go or if I am packing myself a lunch for the studio then an odd assortment of leftovers and picky bits, a boiled egg, a piece of cheese, some of that daikon kimchi, cold rice, pasta salad, smoked mackerel, a piece of pork pie, some crackers, four radishes, a pear; whenever I go through a phase like this I worry that I am forgetting how to cook properly - how to dice, slice, sweat, braise, season - and am not particularly disabused of this worry by a solo dinner I make of leek and cabbage orzo, the vegetables finely sliced and sweated soft in olive oil with a little caraway, some ham stock from the freezer added along with a parmesan rind and then the pasta cooked directly in the resulting soup to which, forgetting that the ham stock is very salty, I add a big pinch of salt and then burn my tongue tasting it anyway and eat the whole panful more to dispose of the evidence than out of any particular hunger or enjoyment.

on the page

It says something still about the state of the canon and all the prejudices it involves conscious or otherwise that despite studying American Literature and specifically the Beats and their offshoots for a number of years I had never (I thought) read much or any Diane di Prima, although I did recognise a few bits of Dinners and Nightmares I must have seen quoted or anthologised somewhere, the menstrual stew, the very good indeed iced coffee, the artist who will stick to landscapes and still life. In any case it is the kind of writing to make you immediately feel you know the writer well, carelessly intimate and confessional, her lost bohemian New York City of meals scraped together or feasts luxuriated in, at home, in diners, in cold apartments with friends and disappointing lovers.

I started this Substack largely out of necessity, as a replacement for my Tinyletter when that platform announced they were shutting up shop, but I knew when I did so that I wanted my posts here to be rather different from those sent out as psychogastronomy - notes towards something rather than polished little pieces in their own right, covering less physical ground than the previous travel letters, but maybe more mentally or thematically; a jumble of books, plants, pickles and dishes. I am not a natural note-taker, but I realised I needed these notes because I was writing a sort of testament.

Three years ago when my father died I began to write an account of the allotment which quickly became an account of him - the two inextricable - and the year we spent working more or less side by side, me on my half-plot and him on his, an account of family rituals, recipes, plants and seeds swapped and shared, of the life in the soil; a book that I needed to write, however hard it felt. Although taking place before this I started writing leaf / notes, the writing of it was fed and watered by the weekly practice of writing here, and the space that it gave me to think about growth, grief, the churn of the seasons. I am very pleased to be able to say that this book will be published in August as The Allotment Diaries, and that you can pre-order it now from all of the usual places.

My father was a keen fan of both folk music and of taping things off the radio, so I’ve also put together a mixtape of songs which were important to him or which are mentioned in the book or which I listened to while writing it (or all three) which you can listen to here.

I hope to be visiting a number of bookshops, allotments, restaurants and gardens to launch the book - keep an eye here or on my Instagram for further details, or get in touch if you’d like to host anything! For review copies or any publicity enquiries please email amy.richardson@littlebrown.co.uk.

I plan today all wrong, first believing the forecast when it says it will be windy but dry, then getting to the allotment at the exact moment it begins to rain, deciding I will stick it out until I get too cold, leaving as the sun comes out again, messing around for long enough to miss the train I was planning on getting, then finally walking back to the railway station through a brief hailstorm to find that the later train is delayed by forty-five minutes due to something or other and so I wait unable to use my phone because I forgot to bring my charger with me; in the middle of this I give myself an enormous blister on my thumb because I can’t be bothered to put my gloves on to continue last week’s whittling project. All in all not a day well-spent but it is hard to see it is a waste of time exactly partly because I doubt I would have done anything more productive at home but mostly because it is a pleasure to spend time outside, even in a light rain, chipping away at a piece of hazel-wood, when - despite knowing that there is another cold snap to come - the signs of spring are everywhere, new shoots of nettle, new shoots of fennel, leaves of wild garlic coming up amongst the grass and the weeds at the base of the hazel tree, I think for a minute about picking them all and making one tiny sacred soup but instead I just cut a bunch of daffodils and walk off into the fickle weather.

in the kitchen

Pancake Day, of course, the end of Carnival or Carnevale or Mardi Gras or whatever you choose to call it, tonight a restaurant in town is doing (as it is also the Lunar New Year) endless crispy duck pancakes and so I won’t be cooking any pancakes myself; I have a vague idea to make Staffordshire oatcakes which are a sort of savoury oat flour pancake to have with bacon or cheese or both which I may or may not follow through on. Last year I made buckwheat galettes; one reason I never seem to make sweet pancakes (just sugar and lemon, thanks) for Pancake Day is because my enthusiasm for them is pale compared to my wife’s enthusiasm for frittelle, Venetian doughnuts made with a barely-sweet yeasted dough enriched with pinenuts and raisins and dusted hot from the oil with sugar which we make together for an event at the community gardens (she makes the dough, I fry it) and then she makes again the day after just for fun, fitting to gorge ourselves just once a year.

on the page

I order a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI of The Aenied because I want to read it again and I don’t know what I have done with my copy and the same day it arrives I buy a battered old Everyman edition of The Divine Comedy because it feels like I should probably read it and I had completely forgotten until I had both books in front of me that Virgil is of course a main character in The Divine Comedy and that Book VI specifically, a descent into the underworld, is an obvious and major influence on Dante’s work. I don’t have much to say about that except that it is nice when things line up, and when books come your way just at the time when it seems that you should be reading them.

It says on the the news that it has rained somewhere in Britain every day this year, so far, and I can well believe it; even a day like today that begins all sun and brisk breezes dissolves by the mid-afternoon into mizzling damp. I manage several hours at the allotment before it does, but despite the sun everything that I need to burn is still damp from the days and weeks before, and even when packed optimistically round with dry newspaper and kindling does little more than smoulder miserably. The rules of the allotment require me to wait on site until it has finished doing so and although I think there is little chance of the wet grass and the wet weeds and the wet earth catching fire I don’t have anything better to do on this sunny afternoon and so I take the opportunity to potter around, sawing up the old cardoon stalks, rather taller than me, which have been leaning up against the hedge since the autumn, piling them neatly up on what I am hoping will become a hugelkultur bed, checking on the blanching rhubarb one stalk of which at least is racing up in search of light, reapplying slug defences around the broad beans and finally, since I have my dad’s old pruning saw with me, wickedly sharp, sawing off a branch of hazel which is making a nuisance of itself in the middle of the tree with the intention of making a walking stick or staff. It is rather too long to begin with and, cutting a piece off the end, get sidetracked into carving that with my grafting knife, stripping off the bark and then cutting away the wood layer by layer in long strokes and shorter ones until the thing I have in my hand begins to resemble a butter knife. The sky is grey and clouded over when I realise I am surrounded by wood chips and the incinerator has stopped smoking entirely and I see why whittling is such a stereotypically popular way to pass the time, if you don’t have a book or a phone or much else to do.

in the kitchen

I meet up with a friend to eat a one-off meal cooked by roving chef Gareth Storey, Ed McIlroy of Tollington’s Fish Bar, and the Yellow Bittern’s Hugh Corcoran at Cadet, a wine bar in Newington Green I’ve been meaning to visit for ages. There’s all the things you might expect from these chefs, tripe stewed with butterbeans, a beautiful pig’s head terrine, pickled mussels and carrots and squares of pig’s ear all jumbled up together, a magnificent-looking fish stew/soup crowned with langoustines and bits of lobster (I think - we didn’t order one) and, most viscerally pleasurable, a plate of lamb shoulder and its juices sitting on a bed of matchstick potatoes and allioli so that with each forkful of lamb you can get a bite of creamy-gravy-soggy-chips with pockets of pure allioli here and there. The surprise hit though that I decide to recreate as soon as possible is a little plate of soft fudgy chickpeas bound in a mass of very-cooked spinach, very nurturing in flavour and texture. I got early to Newington Green so while I was waiting for our booking I went to the greengrocer to get some nice Italian lemons to make into marmalade as I haven’t for years, to Dan Lepard’s method, straightforward but with overnight soaks to break up the work and extract as much pectin from the fruit as possible, a very successful method every time I have tried it. While the lemon peel is cooking in its soaking water I make a pan of those chickpeas, a very confusing combination of smells to experience, as if the chickpeas were flavoured mainly with preserved lemon, or I was making garlicky-paprika-y marmalade.

on the page

Although like everyone else I dislike the term guilty pleasure there are certainly some books I read which I would not consider as artistically important or as creatively satisfying as others, being more or less formulaic or downright silly or whatever; I am particularly a sucker for historical fiction which makes a detective of some real-life or literary figure not usually known for their detective powers. Usually I pick these up in the charity bookshop, perhaps a book in the middle of a series, and read them and enjoy them and give them back to the charity bookshop and never think about them again. The other day I got a book called Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol which had everything you want from such books, ludicrous cameos, plenty of comedically staged that’s-where-he-got-that-idea-from moments, a reasonably nuanced but still broad caricature of the protagonist himself, complete with dialogue taken word-for-word from his writings or famously-quoted conversations; a fun evening’s read, in other words, and back it goes to the charity shop.

With nothing particularly urgent to do at the allotment and with meetings and things taking up my time I come in later in the week than usual and, it turns out, on an especially wet and miserable day; the piles of pruned blackberry and raspberry waiting to be burned just sit there getting wetter. It has been so warm this week despite the rain and January seemed to go on for so long that I catch myself half-expecting to see some signs of spring, some new growth on the nettles in the hedgerow perhaps, a few tiny leaves of wild garlic, even a spear of asparagus pushing through the soil but of course it is far too early. At the top of my plot the first stalks of rhubarb are showing themselves bright pink against the grass and the weeds, the artichokes further down are growing well, and everywhere at the edges there are blankets of cleavers coming up, the first shoots of goosegrass / sticky-weed / sticky willy that are one of the first plants of the year to cleave through the soil and which are supposed to be very good for you in some way or another (the lymphatic system??) if you infuse them in water overnight; a chef I used to work with made a liqueur with some once which tasted, I think, rather like pondweed. I pick a handful and stuff them into a jar of rainwater collected from a bucket on my mother’s plot to ferment and make into a film developer, at some point in the future.

in the kitchen

We get a weekly veg bag from the community gardens which means, at this time of the year, that we get a lot of root vegetables that need using, hopefully not just in an endless succession of soups. They grow lovely daikon which I ferment; I refuse to have anything to do with parsnips but my wife grates them into a sort of baked fritter / savoury cake thing which I have to admit is perfectly pleasant; neither of us is particularly enthusiastic about cooked beetroot, especially since it takes so long to do, and so they tend to accumulate at the bottom of the fridge. Remembering Tamar Adler’s advice in An Everlasting Meal to make it as easy as possible for yourself to cook and eat well I spend an afternoon washing them carefully and then baking them, skins on, with a splash of vinegar and water, a bay leaf, some peppercorns and coriander seeds and a clove of garlic, as tightly covered as I can manage given there is no foil in the house, for a couple of hours, until it is easy to get the blade of the little bird-beaked knife through the largest one. Then when they are cool enough to handle I rub the skins off and they are ready to cook again with potato and onion and turned into a thick soup to have with toasted cheese or blitzed into a dip with twarog and oil and I don’t know what else and in the end I wish there were more of them to dress in yoghurt and have as a salad with smoked mackerel fishcakes.

on the page

Feeling rather stuck in a rut of reading non-fiction in the name of research and unwilling for the time being to acquire any more books I scour my shelves for a novel I haven’t read and come across a book I have no recollection of buying or being given, The Cheffe by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump. I think I had vaguely assumed from the spelling that this was a historical novel about an olde cheffe in some court or manor but in fact it is cheffe as the feminine of chef, about a chef and restaurateur in modern-day France who is referred to by her title throughout the book, narrated as it is by a protege of hers. As most of the power of the book comes through its hypnotic, obsessive prose there is no point in describing it much here except to note that is one of the few novels about cooking that I have read which hasn’t been in some way annoying, jolting me out of the story with some silly technical mistake or vile-sounding combination of ingredients; in fact the descriptions of the chef’s elegant, understated cuisine had me nodding along and wishing briefly to be back at the stove.

I always said good idea and then never did anything about it, partly because I didn’t particularly want to write a recipe book but largely because, working full time in a restaurant which didn’t make much use of ferments and not cooking for my own pleasure as much as I would have liked, it would have felt rather fraudulent to do so. In a piece I wrote a couple of years ago for Filler zine I wrote about idealised kitchens, how in my first book I had written myself a cooking space I do not recognise in any of the kitchens I have worked or lived in and how I didn’t want to do that again.

Since then I have started monthly fermenting classes at Windmill Community Gardens here in Margate and more recently, having stepped away at least for the moment from the restaurant world I am cooking and pickling for myself again, filling up the corners of my tiny kitchen with jars of this and of that.

In short, this seemed the perfect time to revisit Rebecca’s suggestion, not (for now at least) as a book (sorry Rebecca!) but as a regular journal, to keep a record for myself of what I have been preserving that is hopefully useful and inspirational for others too. Maybe it will become a book, in time!

January 2026

A resurgent enthusiasm for putting things in jars came with the need, before we went away for Christmas, of using up the last of the veg bag. So a frequent January snack was a bit of red cabbage, beetroot and red onion sauerkraut on the side of whatever eggs or tinned fish or bread and cheese we were having. I like sauerkraut-based stews (jota, choucroute garni, bigos) but not with red cabbage kraut, which would obviously look quite alarming. I suppose you could add some to braised red cabbage! I didn’t, and the jar is finished.

Leftover from two separate workshops at the gardens I have two cheongs, one made with unripe gooseberries and one with raw quince. These fermented syrups are very easy to make - I’ll detail a recipe when I make another, or you can look up Kenji Morimoto’s - and very rewarding in terms of flavour. I’m planning on using mine for a second fermentation of kombucha, when mine wakes up again - the gooseberry with mountain tea or maybe oolong, the quince with black tea. For now I use some of the gooseberry cheong to sweeten a tisane of sage and mountain tea.

We are starting to build up a surplus of mooli / daikon at the bottom of the fridge so I decide to make some kimchi with it. Traditionally kimchi is made in huge amounts by large groups of people, each sharing their recipes and their expertise. This is the spirit I try to bring to my workshops, which I see as social occasions for mutual learning rather than teaching as such, but even making a single jar at home by yourself can be social if you let lots of recipes in - allow what you do to be guided by the advice of friends, strangers, many hands.

My kimchi recipe is not my kimchi recipe but a reflection of many I have read about or eaten or made before with nothing particularly distinctive about it except the use of cooked rice and pear in the porridge instead of rice flour, which I read about in Songsoo Kim’s writing for Vittles and have used ever since. Feel free to adjust to your own taste and according to what vegetables you have to hand. I used what veg I had from the community gardens; one of the directors of the Margate Crab Museum gave me a bottle of the fish sauce he makes, so I obviously used that too, but I normally just use Squid Brand.

Read more

After the bramble, this week it is the raspberry’s turn to be cut down – less of a struggle than the blackberry, with straight-grown canes which just need neatly trimming at the base, quite close to the ground. To prune is to be reminded just how different a plant is from an animal, that you can hack off the dead wood or the growing ends enough to make a nice shape, perhaps, or enough as leaves nothing living and visible above the earth and leave behind a creature that is not just fine but in fact healthier than it was before, freed from constraints; you have to understand that the self of a plant is not centralised or ruled top-down but spread right out through the body, each part as important as the other. I believe with the philosopher of botany Stefano Mancuso that our ideas of the hierarchy of the body (top-down, ruled by the brain) and therefore all our ideas about hierarchy in general stem from the simple physical fact that we look out of the same place that we think, and so locate our selves there, at the top of things; how differently might we treat the world if our eyes looked out of our gut, an older and more useful organ than the grey matter filling our skulls? How differently again if we had no eyes at all, and got our viewpoint from every inch of skin, or from the clouds and trails of scent which surround us, bleeding one self into the next, backwards and forwards in time – yes, to prune is to be reminded how a plant might think, in spreading coils under the earth.

in the kitchen

After the Christmas cake and all of the chocolates have gone January means Burns Night, which as I’m sure I have written before is one of the few satisfactorily food-based festivals we have in Britain, straightforwardly so after the presents and rituals and baggage of Christmas itself. Yes, it is a celebration of the Romantic poet and folk-song collector Robert Burns but practically speaking it is mainly a celebration of the haggis, warm-reekin’, rich, perfect for the weather at this time of the year and also for Organuary, a month-long celebration of offal I keep trying without much effort or success to popularise in the face of Dry January or Tryanuary. Although I have vague plans every year to make a haggis lasagne (white ragú of haggis with chunks of swede in it, oat-milk bechamel) I never do, something we only eat once a year doesn’t need much elegant variation although there are always leftovers. A series of Irn-Bru sponsored recipe cards I pick up at Sainsbury’s includes haggis tacos (featuring Irn-Bru hot sauce) and haggis mac and cheese (featuring Irn-Bru pickled jalapeños) and a haggis toastie (I forget how Irn-Bru was involved here). A friend made Irn-Bru ice-cream this year but we forgot to eat it and just had the crumble and custard my wife made. As well as the lasagne I always I intend to remake this ice-cream for Burns but never organise myself in time, although there is no real reason not to make it any time of the year, perhaps especially while it is still winter to go with a steamed marmalade pudding.

on the page

In the bookshop at the airport on the way back from Italy at the start of the month I picked up a collection of Umberto Eco essays called Serendipities, which turned out to contain many of the ideas (about signs, about what a perfect language might look like, about real discoveries born of false assumptions) he would dramatize and explore in The Name of the Rose, which I then reread, and was reminded that 2026 is the eight-hundredth anniversary of the death of Francis of Assisi, a big year in the Catholic Church! It must have been disappointing for many and perhaps a relief to others that the last pope did not manage to last another year to mark the occasion. This in turn as well as a desire to rid my shelves of books I haven’t read made me pick up what I thought was a life of Francis by the French historian Jacques le Goff, in fact a series of essays analysing the sainted friar in the network of the world he lived in, its social structures and norms, looking back to the Middle Ages, forwards to modernity. What is striking is how disputed the facts and meaning of Francis’ life are, how a man who when it comes down to it seems to have mainly wanted to be left alone can find himself dragged back and forth by the Church as they tried to subsume and neuter his genuine radicalism, by modern thinkers angry that he was in fact a medieval Catholic man; there are stories in which he seems to do nothing but weep and pray, and others which make him a holy fool, jester of God, depending on what point the author is trying to make. Really it makes me think how hard it is to write of someone else’s life, and how perhaps every biography or even every story should contain within itself an apology for existing.

First a pace around the plot to ascertain that the garlic is doing fine (the Isle of Wight better than my own saved cloves), that the kale has indeed all died, mainly that the broad beans have not been killed off as yet by mice or by slugs or by frost, and then it is time to address the bramble. This last year it put far more energy into its spreading flesh than it did into fruiting and so I am anticipating something of a battle, with not just the old dead wood to remove but also the newer creeping suckers which have wormed their way through the grass and into the currants, the garlic, under the greenhouse on the lot next door; suckers which are not only remarkably tenacious in their grip on the soil and covered in sharp spines but also, it seems at times, malevolently animated, capable of whipping themselves around in the hand to snag on twine, netting, other plants, sleeves and trousers and coats. Today though on the only sunny day of the week the work goes by smoothly, cut lengths of dead and green bramble alike joining a steadily growing pile to be burnt once everything has dried out a little, my only concern really is that everything is too green. Ideally this pruning is doen in the coldest part of the year when everything is more or less dormant to avoid wasting the plant’s growth and energy with what you cut away but everything still seems very much awake, alive - for the last few weeks I have been reading that spring plants are up everywhere, a definite sign our winters are not what they were. The bramble at least seems indestructible, and the worst I could do through unwise pruning is to deny myself and the birds a good season of fruit.

in the kitchen

In the last week the weather has been mostly grey and my wife has been mostly ill and so I have been devoting the unfamiliar amount of free time I have to make broths of various kinds, a slow and lengthy process which makes for quick and easy meals. The bones and scraps from a rotisserie chicken joined spring onion, ginger, a piece of seaweed and a couple of mushrooms to make a light soup we had with rice and bits and pieces; beef bones from the supermarket (actually short ribs with quite a lot of meat still on them boiled for hours with onion, celery, carrot will become a French onion soup, the beat perhaps polpette or pasta filling; on the stove this afternoon is a ham hock from the butcher round the corner from the railway station in Canterbury, with parsley stalks and leek greens along with the usual veg, the last of a bottle of cider in with the water, and a packet of split peas waiting in the cupboard to make a meal of it.

on the page

I can’t quite decide mentally speaking if I am still in holiday mode or if I am back at work and should be reading accordingly and so I keep starting different books, one on dowsing and divining for something I am researching, a reread of The Name of the Rose for “fun”, a book about soup I keep dipping into while making so many, unable to quite settle on any of them, but in between I pick up a copy of Jesper Sjödahl’s Nothing New: Considered Cooking that a friend has sent us, a lovely little book from the same one-man press as my own Psychogastronomy, and find myself reading the whole thing in an afternoon, nodding along to advice on the proper size of a salad bowl, on roasting a chicken, on the importance of a good pot of beans - a book of soothing pleasures that is perfect, this time of the year.

A year in the soil inevitably could be listed as a year of setbacks, one by one as the seasons turn, a calendar made of

the month the frosty earth was too hard to dig

the month the blackfly came

the month of blight

or

the month it did not rain

and certainly if I look back at what I managed to cultivate and harvest I have to admit that it is rather less than I might have done, if I was better organised, if the weather had been different, if slugs and mice and pigeons were not so hungry. It is unfortunate that the rhythms of my work as a chef in a seaside town mean than I have been busiest when the earth is busiest, and that in my quiet months of winter there is very little practical work for me to do at the allotment; pruning, trimming, tidying away, finite tasks unlike the never-ending demands of summer gluts and green grass growing, nettle, dandelion, thistle, creeping buttercup, teasel, plantain and bindweed, all of which need dealing with in their particular way; I could go to the allotment now and take stock of all the things I have not done.

A better way to spend my time might be to evaluate my successes, to note that the rhubarb forcibly relocated up towards the hedge is doing well, that the wild garlic I planted out beneath the hazel tree has taken hold and even multiplied beneath the soil, that the roots are down there riotous; that despite the blackfly the spring-sown dwarf broad beans gave sweet little pods for salads and soups; that cucumbers and climbing beans do well together in each other’s space and shade, good harvests of each; that if I keep an eye out I can take enough nuts off the tree to make a splendid cake and still leave enough for the squirrels; that the allotment’s green chapel is as fine a place to spend an hour or two on a cold winter’s day, squinting into the lowering sun, as it is at the end of summer, picking berries between thorns.

in the kitchen

Somewhere towards the end of this summer I began to realise how long it had been since I had cooked anything new in the course of my restaurant work; new to me, that is – I don’t think I have ever cooked anything that could be called entirely new. The garnish on the mozzarella changes from broccoli to broad beans to melon to squash, asparagus and mushrooms and herbs and greens come in and out of season in Italy and in Britain, on and off the menu. I don’t think that this is a bad thing, a testament rather to the identity of the restaurant that it can be so secure in what it cooks and what it does not, always different, always the same; but it was a sign to me.

In my monthly workshops at Windmill Community Gardens, on the other hand, constrained as they are by what is available locally, by what is possible and pleasurable to do sitting together in the outdoors, each session brought something new – techniques I hadn’t tried before like macerating fruit for cheong, ideas like using a puree of nettle leaves in miso, challenges like a meat grinder breaking half-way through grinding pumpkin seeds. For these and other reasons this is my last week in the restaurant kitchen for the foreseeable future, probably not for ever; I do like cooking, if not necessarily for 16 hours straight. It’s hard of course to finish anything but I’ve been encouraged by new projects and opportunities coming my way even before I had told anyone my changing circumstances – more to come I hope in the new year. I look forward to cooking with different people, leading workshops, working on my photography, and writing much much more. Get in touch if you’d like to do any of these things together!

on the page

For the last few years I have kept a month-by-month list of all the books I read. Originally intended as a simple record (I read a lot and tend to give paperbacks to charity when I have finished them so I don’t always remember everything I read) this perhaps inevitably (Aries sun and moon, you know) became a mild competition I have with myself, comparing yearly stats, staying up late on the 31^st to get one last book in for the month; I don’t like this tendency in myself! Volume is an idiotic way to think about reading. Anyway this year I see I have dipped to an all-time low (unless I read 18 books in the next couple of weeks) although I think that is partly because I have read more interesting books, and savoured them. Here in only chronological order is a list of my favourite books I read this year:

The Unreliable Nature Writer, Claire Carroll

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Towards Darkness, Irene Solà

The Goose of Hermogenes, Ithell Colquhoun

The Accidental Garden, Richard Mabey

Pariah Genius, Iain Sinclair

Fascist Yoga, Stewart Home

House of Day, House of Night, Olga Tocarkzuk

The Tower, Thea Lenarduzzi

The Silver Book, Olivia Laing

The Future of Truth, Werner Herzog

leaf / notes is taking a break now until the second week of January – I’ll see how much reading I can get done before then, and whether the broad beans survive the cold.