Largely food content
I know! And only a bit of gardening
Hello hello! Isn’t it just the most glorious day? Today I have links to three recipes for you - one chicken, one fish, one veggie - to make up for weeks of not talking about food. And just the tiniest bit of garden chat because - look! This is my current view, no filter.
The tulips are v sadly over, but the alliums are out, and the roses and peonies in abundant bud. I note that neighbours on the same street have roses AND peonies in full bloom - not sure how I picked the Selfish Giant straw. A bizarre just-this-garden microclimate?
I know that patch on the right looks a bit bare, but there are lots of tiny nigella and cosmos seedlings - the 9cm lavender & erigeron which I put out in late March, expecting them to spread like a lovely front-of-border carpet are still all 9cm. Tsk. Luckily, the 9cm scabious is thriving, but really, who names a plant after both scraped knees and infectious disease? What an odd person.
As a comparator, here’s a ‘before’ picture, and a second one from March, just as I started to dig like a maniac and spend all our disposable income on plants, inspired by Jo Thompson’s small garden design course and Lucy Maxwell’s joyful garden writing:
It’s so lovely to have a reason - and now a path - to get to the top of the garden. Tim took the children out yesterday, so I sat in one of the generously sized children’s chairs (kind of them to factor in childbearing hips), mugged off work and the 600 pending gardening jobs, and read Gillian McAllister’s Famous Last Words instead. Highly recommend, along with her Wrong Place, Wrong Time, which I read the night before with a box of mixed Ferrero Rocher. (The incredibly lovely nurse at my GP surgery gave me a Raffaelo from her handbag after last month’s injection, and now I’m addicted. Even though I don’t usually like white chocolate? It must be the desiccated coconut, even though it’s making the bed slightly crunchy - hard to eat without shedding everywhere.)
Review
My sister told me on this morning’s family what’s app* that my article in yesterday’s Guardian is trending on both the ‘most read’ and the ‘most deeply read’ panel online - not bad for a chickpea review. Maybe because the headline they picked was ‘Just one chickpea was enough to turn my middle-class worldview to dust’, or because by the end of the article, dazed by excessive consumption, I went beserk and slated my all-time favourite shop for their incredibly shit tinned chickpeas. Anyway, I put it more eloquently in the article - I think.
Recipe: chicken
My next food link is this really fantastic crispy chicken with zhoug and jersey royals. There’s something incredibly satisfying about taking a rolling pin, smashing the hell out of a piece of food, then eating it crumbed and fried. The zhoug is a Yemeni coriander, chilli and preserved lemon sauce, which turns the schnitzel into something really quite special - I used the rest to stir through the hot, just cooked jersey royals. Recipe if you click the photograph, or the link above.
Recipe: Fish
If you fancied something to update your one-tin fish traybakes, I made this addictive Indonesian style chilli sambal to go on top of roasted hake and it’s so good. I’m getting really hungry writing this. You finish it off with peanuts and lime:
Recipe: Veggie
I can’t stir peas through pasta without feeling like it’s nursery food - but I did want to put asparagus, peas and orzo together, so came up with a pea pesto instead. Sounds dull, tastes fantastic. You blitz it while the orzo cooks, then top everything with the lightly griddled asparagus - so good.
I’m now really, really hungry, so going to forage for something in the kitchen - my apologies for the shorter than usual post today, I have about three articles in my drafts folder for you (serious, frivolous, dogs) but none of them are quite good enough yet to publish, and my brain is fried by too much sunshine - how do people get anything done in summer?
If you enjoyed this piece, please do click the heart button - more visibility on Substack, etc - and have a lovely afternoon! Mini xx
*Is anyone else really irritated about the AI thing on what’s app, by the way? It seems like there’s no way to get rid of it, but it feels so invasive to have an AI living in there, reading all my - admittedly inane - messages. Maybe should cut back on the plants & put aside money for stamps.
Yea, the AI thing is creepy. I don't know how it is okay to do without user consent!
I feel like the last person in the world to get on the AI train. I absolutely hate it in all of its shitty forms.