Sherlock Holmes, a superb stew, Joni, and the unpleasantness of pigeons
Abundance: Wednesday 31 January 2024
It’s 6.55am.
I often wake at this time. The old man set his alarm for 6.55 - its tinny clang floating across the landing to scrape at my ears. Five minutes later, kettle on, radio on, he’d be stood in the lav, door half open, farting in time to the 7am pips.
This morning, this early, the garden, the street, the town, is flooded in a Sherlock Holmes fog: everything is damp; there’s no space where space normally is. It’s the kind of day it’s hard to find a reason to leave the house, but if you don’t it can feel like you’re back in bed before you’ve got up.
I’m going nowhere, though. Not even to the shops. Today is best served by cooking, a fire, Joni, and a short nose around the garden. Between them, the veg patch, the fridge and the cupboard are going to have to provide.
I have a friend a few miles up the coast who has one rule about growing food: he’s not giving up space to anything that takes as long to arrive as a baby. No sprouts, give over celery, not interested in cauliflower, and so on. It’s a good rule if you have limited space: why dedicate even a square foot for most of a year for the reward of just one meal. The downside is that as lively and abundant as 10 warmest months of the year can be by prioritising them, these early weeks of the year are the leanest. But there is something; there is always something.
And today’s something is chard. We grow a few varieties, including the colourful Bright Lights and the white ribbed Fordhook Giant. Not content with taking up residence in the wisteria and shagging their way through spring, the pigeons seem inclined towards the Fordhook Giant at this time of year, but leave the Bright Lights mercifully untouched.
Cutting the stems a couple of inches from the soil leaves the plant with enough of an engine room to resprout for harvesting again in a couple of summer weeks, and maybe 3 or 4 times that at this sluggish time of year.
The spells of endless rain have left the chard in need of a soak - the soil beneath splashed on to the leaves and into the grooves of the stalks - but half an hour in the sink and they’re clean, leaving a powdery tea around the plug.
The fridge offers up a head of celery, a lemon, and half a pack of tarragon. The celery has as much flavour as the day it was picked, and a lemon can save almost anything. Had it been a few weeks down the line, I might’ve had a little sweet cicely to pick, but the tarragon will be differently perfect here.
In the end, I got two delicious recipes out of everything - cooked and prepared in the time it took Hejira to bring a little sunshine to this foggy day.