Exchanging Pheasantries

One afternoon driving along a narrow village lane between fields of sheep to be counted, we spied an old family friend strolling towards us, swinging a tan hessian sack as he walked. We stopped, wound down the window, and caught up on life.
After a while, our friend held up the sack with a wry smile and said "You wouldn't like a brace of pheasant would you?" 

Now, this is an offer not to be taken lightly. Any bumpkin worth her salt knows what the acceptance of a brace of pheasant entails. I had had plans for the evening; nice, clean, comfortable plans. But we couldn't resist the thought of fresh game to be cooked, and for free! So we thanked our friend, stowed the bundle safely and were on our way.

I know many a millennial like me, who would squirm at the thought of plucking a dead bird to eat, but I believe that doing things like this is an important part of my relationship with food. It teaches me to appreciate the animal, to understand where it has come from, and to respect it in the way that I cook it. Unrecognisably processed meats in plastic packaging allow people to remain in denial of what they are doing, by distancing them from the reality of what life and death truly looks like.

The birds have beautiful plumage. I am vandalising a work of art. Every iridescent feather stuns, yet layered in their thousands they create even more perfect symphonies on the wing of the hen, and rioting colour on the breast of her partner. As I pluck the birds, which to be done well cannot be done gently, I conclude that the only way that I can atone for this destruction, is to create. They are not to be cooked irreverently. 

It has long been argued that cooking is indeed an art form. And so, back to the backbone of this long-neglected blog I must go. The only tome of a cookbook I took with me in my weight-restricted Easy-jet luggage for a year in Siena: Katie Caldesi's The Italian Cookery Course. The Italians have always been keen cacciatore (hunters), particularly when it comes to birds. Even small birds somewhat controversially. 

Lo and behold, a gorgeously seasonal recipe for a brace of pheasant:  'Fagiano in umido all'arancia con castagne e uva secca' credited to the Borella family from Parma. 

This translates as Pot roasted pheasant with orange, chestnuts and sultanas. The recipe begins leisurely, by briefly roasting some chestnuts in the Rayburn. The pheasants trussed up with bacon, bay and string and browned,I swap the white wine for cider - we're in Dorset not Le Borelle after all. It is a very simple recipe really, that just relies on a few good ingredients and time. Given an hour and a half in the steaming pot, the pheasant absorbs the flavours of the orange, chestnuts, wine and sultanas and emerges tender rather than tough. Although Katie advises that the sauce may need thickening with flour, mine comes out silkily sticky all by itself. 

Served up with some sweet bashed neeps leftover from Burn's Night and steamed kale, I let the pheasant do the talking. I loved the simple decadence of the recipe. It was sweet, tender, subtle and yet rich. Sometimes people drown their game in thick, heavy tomato based sauces which I think are designed in part to disguise any overly gamey flavours. This is not to dismiss the wonders of a warming winter ragù which I have been a huge fan of ever since I ate a wild boar version with thick ribbons of pappardelle and juniper berries at a restaurant in Siena. The difference that I enjoyed here however was the relative lightness of the dish, lifted by the citrus. Winter doesn't have to mean heavy, and the flavour of the birds were celebrated and complimented rather than used as a hidden base layer to something else. 

Where I will find my next inspiration remains to be seen... but pheasants are £3.99 at the local butcher's shop. 

Through Bullion Glass

[“Do you want the truth or something beautiful?” — Paloma Faith]

March 12th

I blushed as I listened to the olive-skinned pair get to know each other in an easy exchange of colloquialisms, my words faltered before they had even been formed. “Piacere”, I said, and immediately regretted it. Their expectations would be high now, I had once called myself fluent but now felt vulnerable. It had been too long since that language last left my tongue. Smiles and torrents of words poured forth from the two Italians as they generously brought me into their conversation and I wanted so badly to answer but the vowels all came out misshapen.  He was a northerner, and I couldn't fathom his vernacular. I bowed my head and resumed an embarrassed silence.

I yearn for that language, the key that unlocks so many memories of the place where I felt complete. That year, the Sienese had truly taken me under their wing. As if connected straight to my heart, my ears swam happily as I listened. It couldn’t last, though, and as the other boy left, a great wave of nostalgia rushed over me, swallowing my sad heart whole. Take me back, portami via.

March 15th

A long, lethargic run in the sun, stopping at intervals to drink in this new landscape with a quick toe dip and splash in the lake. I still harbour that longing for the familiarly worn, red stones criss-crossing the piazza, either scalding or cool as shadows tick across the shell-shaped square like a sundial. Yet, I am contented here now, too. Lake Travis.

Today, we’re going to see Hamilton’s pool. I sleep until we take an off road detour to avoid a traffic jam.  Our short cut took us straight to the cause of the jam. Police cars peppered the highway, left unoccupied at odd angles as their drivers had pulled up hurriedly and leapt from them. I swallowed as my sleepy eyes took in the scene beyond them. Everything seemed paused as a helicopter buzzed in the hot air overhead, also surveying the wreckage. Cars, crumpled like empty soda cans were strewn everywhere, unrecognisable. No survivors, I concluded: there could not be.

March 15th

Hamilton Pool was an alter world, with the dripping overhang stretching on as though my eyes were of bullion glass. I took a long gulp of damp air and discarded my shirt and shorts, discarding my insecurities along with them. I needed to feel alive, for those who were not, as well as myself. I dug my toes into the chalky mud, my soles gripping the stone as I clambered my way under the pelting water. Bowing my head to it, I sat foetally until I felt new again and the others joined me.

March 16th

In San Antonio we booked a cheap hotel room between the five of us. The stale air of the room reminded me of that night alone in Rome, my last night in Italy. The man had asked me how I wanted to pay, and then I couldn’t lock the door so I spent the night sitting on the Spanish Steps and sharing a bottle of wine with strangers. Gini had called them “socks-on hotels”; that was another person who had died too soon… I’m back at Emmett’s Grange, a child clinging to her jacket as the wind tore at my hair, bumping across the moors on her faded red quad bike. Mossy limping along beside us and the Scottish Blackface ewes stamping at the old dog with defiant eyes. Then I’m at number 35, home alone after school having excitedly opened an appealing-looking letter addressed not only to my mother but also to me! My jaw ached as my face contorted and great sobs shook my body, hot and cold: An invitation to her funeral.

As the evening draws in, we go downtown. Sleeping horses plod the streets with their cinderella carriages dripping in neon fairy lights and fake flowers. Perusing the River Walk, we finally settle down at a table outside at The Iron Cactus. Conversation flows and we are all at ease again, enjoying ourselves. I savoured a very good martini that slid up to the salted rim like an oil slick with every sip. Laughter cures everything.

The Anemone

The Anemone

My anemone heart is closed to the dusty, bloodlust desert, 

It’s tendrils tightly furled. 

 ‘Don’t breathe that dead air’, it whispers, 

Shrinking from a toxic touch.

 I feel it swim in the

Reservoirs of my eyes, windows so damned dull,

Opaque still nobody knows it’s there

For all to see. Paned with iron.

My soul’s clamped in, clammed up,

I shrink away from a clammy hot touch. 

It buries itself in itself, 

Bares itself only

With a laugh

 So hearty

That the meaning is stifled. 

An ocean lies over me, one great droplet,

Magnifying and distorting 

The sky that is so dry

On the other side.

Under here,

Looking up at everything

There’s oxygen that can’t be found in air. 

I watch as,

Drifting through oil smoke clouds,

The moon hangs upside down,

Too large,

Kissing the horizon. 

Preserved in my watery paperweight,

Those crimsoned tendrils wave mockingly, 

 And recoil

As the hands and hearts of others

Reach through and puncture that perfect surface,

Leaving trails of grit

And other places

On the doorstep of my world. 

The Lost Art

Food is like art, and recently I have been an artist without a muse.

In Italy, England and Wales, I found inspiration in my environment, my friends and my family.

In Texas however, I remain completely uninspired culinarily and anyway, I have only a fridge and a microwave in my dormitory and I am fed at the university dining hall. Fortunately, when the team I am part of travels for competition, we eat out on university expenses. Despite what would at first appear to be a saving grace, I have not been impressed with the quality of the American restaurants that I have been to. Most of the places that we go to are chains; in four months I have only been to one restaurant that was individual and did not assimilate another.  That restaurant was Crown Pizza in Beaumont. An intimate place, Crown Pizza serve pleasingly fresh Italian food in an old shipping container. 

Otherwise, all of the steakhouses and “Italian” restaurants have been disappointing. Famed for their steaks, the Texans certainly won’t be beaten on size but there is nothing special about their flavour. I have also learnt never to order the popular accompaniment to them, the loaded, baked sweet potato. Although my expectations of Italian food here were not as high as those I had of Texan steaks, I was equally as dismayed with it. Every pasta dish that I have been served so far, claiming on the plastic menu to be ‘authentic’ , has been bastardised. The lily has been gilded in suffocatingly sweet or rich sauces that have far too many ingredients.

Perhaps this was why I was so enamoured of a pocket-sized cocktail bar that my old friend Erika introduced me to in Cambridge on my return home at Christmas. The menu was handwritten on good paper whose stains added romance, the inky letters in an elegant scrawl. Artful candlelight, beautiful glassware, provocative photography and fantastic classic cocktails were the perfect accompaniment to such a long-awaited reunion. I drank a smooth sidecar.  The gentle warmth of the cognac and cointreau was a wonderful antidote to the cold night. Having blushingly reprimanded the barman for attempting to remove my glass without my having completely drained it of its dregs, I followed my sidecar with a whisky mac as one last guard against the frosty walk home. 

The next day, we drank another luxurious thing; very good coffee. This was made properly, not “l’acqua sporca”  that I had come across in the States. This was taken both at Erika's house and in Limoncello, an excellent Italian deli down the road. Continuing my indulgence at home, my mother and I giggled every time she brought out her “Rich Italian” blend. If only….

During my stay, Erika also demonstrated just how easy it is to make wonderful food when she smudged some avocado onto slices of bread for lunch putting a poached egg on the top and smattering it with a little salt and pepper. Another example of the wonders of a simple combination of ingredients whose flavours just compliment each other was the bruschetta of goat’s cheese, roasted grapes and walnuts that I made for our solstice party at home. Why is it so difficult to find such classic combinations in America without them having been meddled with and overelaborated? As the Italian saying goes, “Don’t tell the peasants how good fruit and cheese tastes together”.

To give an overview of my culinary homecoming, I cooked and cooked over Christmas and New Year and almost everything was Italian. Venison ragù made with the pici that Mum had stashed away from her last trip, Gennaro Contaldo’s tiramisu al limone, the youtube recipe for which I watch every time I make it even though I have it written down. I just enjoy the way he says “eaps” of sugar and the part at the end when we exclaims incredulously “sometimes, I can’t believe I cook so good!”. Me neither Gennaro, me neither… 

 I can’t believe how much I have longed for the most basic of dishes that I used to cook regularly for myself, that both of my parents always cooked for me and that somehow just tastes better when they cook  it. That dish is pasta with tuna, garlic and anchovies. It is my ultimate comfort food and was probably the most satisfying meal of my entire christmas holidays. 

Not absolutely everything was Italian however. At New Year, staying with my Grandma, Dad and Stepmother, I touched upon some French cuisine. Dad and Kate had presented me with two beautiful cookbooks for Christmas, and as they are now living in France, one was of course, a French one by Rachel Khoo. To treat my Grandma, we cooked a masterpiece each to conclude the three courses of our New Year’s Eve meal. My father created the starter, inspired by Rachel Khoo, of scallops and brown shrimps in filo pastry. As usual it was pure wizardry from the boyish old man in the cowboy hat and the chocolate cigar. Kate served up a fabulous piece of roasted pork with the most moreish of crackling around. And as if we weren’t all gluttoned out already, I really went for the sucker punch with the darkest of chocolate cakes you could ever imagine for pudding. One of Rachel Khoo’s, it was called “The Black Beret” and the cointreau that we drank with it cut it better than a knife. 

Yes, I unapologetically prefer Europe to the United States based on the food alone. It makes me feel homesick and my heart (which would appear to be in cahoots with my stomach) simultaneously longs to be taken back to my beloved Italia. I won't even start on the other things that depress me about America. Yet I feel that I am being hard on the stars and stripes. I am sure that somewhere there is good food hiding away waiting to be found. We shall see...

On the plane I read some F. Scott Fitzgerald and I was struck by a line which read “It was not an American bar anymore - he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it.” Kinda says it all. 

On my arrival back in Texas, I had to pass my lunchtime in Houston IAH airport while waiting for the shuttle bus. Dehydrated, I was shocked to find that water was more expensive than soda. Welcome to America. 

Nostalgia

Walk the streets at two a.m., 

Looking through a moonlight lens,  

Feel the stones caress my feet,

Somehow here my conscience sleeps,

Teach me things I don't understand, 

Words run through my hands like sand. 

Drown my thoughts with your melodies, 

Test me intellectually. 

Cleanse my heart and soothe my mind,

Memories swim in a glass of wine.

Lead me blindfold,

Feed my soul,

Show me that I'm not alone.

            

Christmas and New Year back in Britain

Mum came to stay with me in Swansea the weekend before Christmas ahead of my departure for Hertfordshire for Christmas with my Dad. She brought with her the new sheepdog Dusk, who initially breezed in,  ignoring me totally in true working collie style. It was all about Mum, an incredible bond having been forged between shepherdess and sheepdog already. She soon softened though as we started cooking dinner, the smell of a pair of tiny teal I had bought from the market that morning browning with mushrooms and onion teasing her dreadfully.  It was another amazing deal from the guy at 'Fish Matters' who I regularly get duck, wild boar and braces of pheasant from. The two teal were a real rarity though so I snapped them up before anyone else could , knowing that the Italian grandmother that frequents the market would know a good thing when she saw it too. He said it had seemed a shame to shoot the pretty little things and Mum noted how good a shot he must be when I revealed our dinner menu to her, being extremely surprised that he had deigned to sell them at all.  I got the recipe from this great website that I have recently discovered: www.gametoeat.co.uk 

 We cooked leisurely over a glass of Australian white, with simple vegetables to compliment the richly cream-smothered birds. It was divine. This was followed up in extravagant style with the last of a bottle of artisan amaretto, cheekily dipping a couple of the orange and pistachio cantuccini I had made for granny's Christmas present into the sweet liqueur as the Italians do.

Mum's new iPod blasting out classics from my childhood, evoking different yet converging memories from both of us, we set to straining and bottling the many different jars of berry-filled spirits I had made in September. A song by the Celtic  folk rock band, Runrig, transported me back to that epic journey in a small red metro up to Scotland for my aunt's first wedding back when I was still little enough to be worrying about the safety of my teddy bear when stranded on the hard shoulder, the breathtaking melodies mirroring the dramatic outline of the mountains flanking the motorway on either side of us. The Corrs took me back to a large New Year's Eve party spent at my godmother's house where I first heard it playing during the millenium countdown on T.V. For Mum it is the soundtrack of our old cottage, as I played them again and again with childish obsession.  I was ecstatic to unwrap an early Christmas present from her, which any fan of Italian food ought to be massively jealous of me for: 

 The next day we drove out onto the Gower despite the gales and walked down to Three Cliffs Bay with Dusk, leaping with anticipation and joy  and howling into the wind as it whipped up the waves, each sharp crest catching the bright sunlight and fragmenting into jewel-like shards of spray. We made dark shadows on the shining, wet sand and pocketed gleaming, rainbow shells.

After having  worked up a grand appetite, we headed to a dog friendly pub that we had found on this handy website: www.doggiepubs.org.uk.  It was the King's Head at the picturesque village of Llangennith which was indeed friendly, the Sunday congregation having wandered  across the road from the church to carry on their conversation with the dog-collared vicar, pint in hand.  The food was hearty, Mum having a freshly caught hake beer-battered with a local Gower ale and Myself continuing the theme with a Gower ale and steak pie. Dessert was the real business though, with a mean sticky toffee pudding and a whiskey-laced dark chocolate brownie complete with jaunty cigar and tart coulis.

 

 We soon burnt that off too though with an even brisker walk at Rhossili bay, where the wind was tearing straight in off the Atlantic creating feathery ripples of foam that gusted towards us  frantically.

 

At Grandma's, I received  a fantastically well balanced cook's knife from my Dad and Kate, another amazing present that is a real joy to use.  It was a much needed visit to the Ockenden side of my family and I very much enjoyed having my boyfriend Josh spend it with us too, experiencing one of my favourite Ockenden traditions - champagne at breakfast on Christmas morning with scrambled eggs and salmon on toast. Needless to say we rather wobbled off on our run afterwards...as I ended up doing on countless occasions over the festive period, particularly when staying with Josh's family where I was fed endless rich puddings. Not that I am complaining in the slightest. 

New Year's Eve and it was my turn to cook again.  I composed an easy yet punchy menu with a classic starter and dessert, read Italian - Bruschetta al pomodoro and tiramisù al limone. The twist came with the seasonal main, another recipe from game-to-eat of spiced grilled pheasant with mango and mint dressing. Stress-free deliciousness. Sustained by 'the stickies' as the clock ticked on whilst playing old-school games and listening to the hootenanny until the fireworks burst over the Thames, it was the perfect to end to the year. Buon 2014!

 

 

Pimp your Gin

Having drunk nothing but great Chianti and Limoncello all year whilst out in Italy, I wasn't in a tearing hurry to lower my standards again on my return to university in Swansea. However, whilst the reasonably good stuff was very affordable in Tuscan shops, over here it is top shelf gold dust. So, with an abundance of free fruit at my fingertips every time I walked the dog, I decided that the best solution was to have a stab at making my own drinks using cheap gin or vodka as a base. The recipes are foolproof, requiring solely fruit, alcohol and sugar and there are countless articles online giving ratios and how best to go about it. So far I've made raspberry vodka and sloe gin, rowan berry schnapps, rose hip syrup and Crema di Limoncello.

Vines growing in the 'Orto di Pecci', Siena

Not only was making these naughty beverages an economical triumph, but it was an interesting activity in itself. Everyone I spoke to had their own family recipes and memories to share with me. When I showed my Granny the rose hips that I had gathered, she smiled, remembering being sent out in groups as children to scour the hedgerows for them during the war. The hips were then sent to the government and given back as a syrup for families to use as a source of vitamin C when there were no oranges to be had in times of rationing. Reflecting on this, the use I have in mind for my rose hip syrup seems rather a decadent adulteration in comparison, destined to be combined with prosecco as a twist on the old Bellini. Anyhow, for a good recipe try this link: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Rose hip syrup recipe

The abundance of sloes this autumn

One of the recipes I used was given to my mother at a New Year's Eve party. One of her fellow guests had brought along his home-made tipples as a gift to share:

Trevor's Raspberry Vodka

2 lb raspberries
1 lb sugar
1 pt vodka

Mix the berries with the sugar.
Steep the mixture in the vodka.
Leave alone in an airtight container for a few months, upturning from time to time.

Sugar and raspberries pre-vodka

I was inspired to make the limoncello by my unforgettable stay in Sicily with the Pellegrino family, who served me some of their homemade liqueur frozen so that it became like a shot of sorbet; as delicious as it was potent. Obviously I always knew that it wouldn't taste quite the same using British-bought lemons, but I am pleased to say that the result is still absolutely gorgeous. To try this yourself go to: Rosetta's crema di limoncello recipe *top tip: if you can't find any cheese cloth to strain your limoncello through, buy a pair of tights instead - they will do the job nicely!

Sunflowers and Limoncello: making Swansea feel like home