the hungry writer

Size matters. And writing prompts.

2012-05-25T21:55:00.001+02:00

The lizards are bigger. Okay, it’s been nearly 18 months since we were here, on Hillsboro Beach, FL, but they seem to have been the same size for the two decades we've been coming here so it's a bit of a surprise, this year, to notice they've jumped from the size of an average thumb to the size of a small rat.

They still skitter away from the sun-baked paving stones when they hear you approach but they make a lot more noise in the undergrowth when you pass the hedges that surround each villa. And they don't puff out their little red neck pouches anymore either. I'm not sure what that puffing really meant but I always liked to think it could have been the reptile equivalent of 'Hey, how you doing?' The big ones still make way for you, but rather more slowly which, to me, suggests resentment. It might only be a matter of time before they're as big as the monster we saw a few years back stalking the deck along the Intracoastal Waterway. It must have been four feet from snout to tail-tip with one of those jaggedy spines you normally don't see outside of the British Museum and re-runs of Jurassic Park.

Our friends told us it was probably an escaped pet. Apparently even Komodo Dragons start off cute. This one looked like it could have chewed your foot off.

Holidays involve a period of adjustment: a new time zone, sleeping patterns, a different routine. We're still going to bed quite early and waking up at dawn:

For the third night in a row now I've sat up in bed like a meercat in the early hours of the morning not knowing which appointment I've failed to keep, or which story I miswrote or which MSS I hadn't submitted and my guilty, anxious heart pounds away for a minute until I realise there's nothing to regret or complete.

Foodwise, we've been out for a couple of steaks, and some ahi tuna sushi. Last night we sat on the terrace outside the little villa - you say villa , I say bungalow - with a glass of Grand Marnier over ice topped up with Florida orange juice and wooden skewers threaded with black olives stuffed with cream cheese, marinated artichokes and roasted red peppers:

The most striking thing, but not for the right reasons, I’ve eaten in the last 5 days was a Po’ Boy. I didn’t even know what a Po’ Boy was, which is one of the reasons I chose it at a restaurant facing the ocean at Delray Beach. The menu was heavily in favour of deep fried food and I imagined that if I’d ordered the chicken caesar salad I’d have been asked, ‘Would you you like that deep fried, hun?’

The description of it was pretty good - coconut bread, caramelised onions, tempura battered lobster tail, salad, pickle. I had high hopes, especially when the waitress smiled encouragingly at me and said slowly, more slowly than someone not on drugs should speak, ‘Good choice. The flavour combinations are wonderful.’

I know tempura. At least I thought I knew tempura. Perhaps this was tempura from Japan via Clacton upon Sea. It was… robust. I guess you’d have to be, crossing all those seas to get here. But the lobster tail was sweet and fresh… if a little bland in comparison. It was also, and this’ll come as no surprise, enough for two people. Two people who hadn't eaten for 24 hours.

I did some research for 'po’ boy' when I got back to the villalow or bungilla or bungavilla - for research read 'Wikipedia' - and was relieved that I didn't get the full po' boy on my plate. The name, shortened from 'poor boy', allegedly comes from striking street car workers in New Orleans in 1929. The stories behind some food are more interesting than the contemporary reality, as you'll see if you follow the Wiki link. Although I’m sure natives of New Orleans will be yelping that you can't get a decent po' boy outside the city limits anyway. One day, perhaps.

In the meantime I'm walking up and down the beach each day to make sure that I maintain some connection to the weight I arrived with, and I'm not talking about my luggage. Although there's hardly a chance that a few extra pounds will cause a problem with all this space:

Now, where's that last doughnut?

Hungry Writing Prompts
Write about an animal that scares you.
Write about sleeping.
Write about regret.
Write about being disappointed.
Write about walking somewhere. And walking back.

Florida calls. And writing prompts.

2012-05-18T20:47:00.000+02:00

We're flying to Florida on Sunday. We'll land in Miami around 5.30 in the afternoon, pick up a rental car and head north on I95 to Hillsboro Boulevard then turn east for the A1A and Royal Flamingo Villas on Hillsboro Mile, in the town of Hillsboro Beach. We'll drop our bags and go out for steak. Not any steakhouse and not any steak. It'll be Outbacks in West Boca and we'll both have the Victoria Filet, 'Pittsburgh' medium rare. ('Pittsburgh' is a steak cooked with a seared crust.)

There are a few branches of Outbacks in the UK. We've tried a couple but they're a completely different species to their American counterparts as far as quality of food and service are concerned. It's a chain restaurant with chunky wooden tables and no ceremony but I have yet to find a steak that's better. I've eaten ones in London, other parts of Florida, and Manhattan that have been equally good but at two, three and four times the price. So when we want steak we stick to Outbacks and the one in West Boca is our favourite because it's miles away from any tourist area and generally frequented by locals. And us.

They also (unlike the UK chain) have a great selection of Californian reds and they have an ahi tuna sushi entree that melts like butter in my mouth.

I've had that photo on file for two years. Just look at the spiced crust, the thin rim of cooked tuna and the rose pink hearts of sweet fish. Oh bring on Sunday evening!

This is food cooked simply, both the steak and sushi, as close to their origins as possible. No cloak of sauce or cushion of stuffing. No culinary fireworks.

The last few years have seen me writing more simply, without the poetic fireworks that tended to garnish my first collection of poetry. My subject matter has changed too: my new book, a collection of haibun called forgiving the rain (due from Snapshot Press later this year) mostly deals with memoir, stories that have made me who I am, events from family life, memories of friends and places. The pieces of prose (many of which started life as posts on this blog) blended with haiku poetry approach their subject matter directly rather than obliquely. I don't seem to need the masks (and protection) of metaphor and persona that I leaned heavily on 8 years ago. This direct approach risks, every now and then, tipping the scale from strong emotion into sentimentality for some potential readers. But I would rather take that risk that not take it at all and produce writing that is competent and crafted but fails to make people feel.

The ocean at my doorstep
on Hillsboro Beach.

Our Florida holidays always encourage me to write; there's something about the location next to the Atlantic Ocean, the limitlessness of the view, the big skies, that infects me with expansiveness too. I hope to share some with you over the coming month. And some steak. And some wine. And there's a little hippy home-made burger joint on Hillsboro Boulevard that I want to try this time too: paper napkins, rackety tables and chairs but the char-grill aroma leads you by the nose to its door.

The downside of all this food and wine over the course of a month is that I'm likely to fly back as cargo. But I can always run up and down Port Talbot's mountains when I get back.

Hungry writing prompts

Write about flying.
Write about eating in a restaurant.
Write about a sweet heart, or a sweetheart.
Write about a time you were gripped with strong emotion.
Write about expanding, literally and metaphorically.

Feasting on the past. Living in the present.

2012-05-12T12:25:00.000+02:00

Was there something you specifically wanted to do in your life?’ I asked my mother, a couple of years ago when I was back in Wales. She was still recovering from her hip replacement earlier that year; problems that should have been resolved were refusing to go away. We were sitting in the little conservatory extension at the back of the house drinking tea and looking out at the rain. ‘Not that getting married and having us three wasn’t worth it,’ I added, smiling, ‘but I just wondered what else you might have done.’

She thought for a moment. ‘Probably nursing’, she said.‘That really did interest me. But things were different then. You got married…’.

My mother, age 16, on the left.

This is a photo from March 1949 of my mother and her best friend, Faye. She is 16, before she met my dad, before her life had started to lay down marks on the page ahead of her.

How many of our mothers sacrificed their dreams and hopes for a husband and family? Was it sacrifice or choice? Although it is historically true that women had less choice in the late 1940s and 1950s when it came to education and work, particularly working-class women.

***

I chose to stay on at school and do my A levels when my headmaster offered to find me a Saturday job at M&S. I chose not to go to university and took a job with the Midland Bank in Port Talbot. I chose to accept the bank’s offer of a job in Jersey in 1978. I chose to leave there when I met Tony on a blind date in 1985 and move to Kent.

What of my choices since then? Have they been directed more by Tony, as the principal earner in our relationship, rather than by my own ambitions and desires? One or two people have suggested that over the last 27 years. But what’s the difference between sacrifice and compromise? And do we identify our own more easily than other people’s?

Last week in Port Talbot my friend and history enthusiast, Allen Blethyn, wondered if it had been easier for me to leave Port Talbot than people, like him, who have centuries of family roots in the town. My parents moved there from Llanelli in 1957 to a housing estate that emerged in the same decade and I was born the following year. ‘It’s in our genes,’ he suggested. ‘I don’t think I could have left.'

The idea of not being in control of my life feels unsettling. But if I believe in fate or the over-riding power of genes, that I have no real choice, then that will inhibit me from making changes, won’t it? The truth, or my truth, must lie somewhere in the middle. Too much control dampens spontaneity and discovery. Not enough leads to stagnation.

We are the maps of our own lives. I am happy with my current location so I cannot regret any choices I made (or sacrifices or compromises) that led me here. Even the dead-ends and the occasional wastelands. I don’t hunger for the past. But it is always a feast worth sitting at with family and friends.

'cardsharks' : with my parents, sister and brother-in-law

***

My mother has undergone hip revision surgery at a private clinic because the NHS waiting list was too long. It is unjust that my parents should have to use some of their life savings to rectify a misjudgement that took place while she was under NHS care. But lengthy litigation would be the only way to pursue our case and my mother is so relieved to be free of the chronic pain that she wants to look ahead rather than back. As we all do too. The nurses at the clinic, particularly the ward sister and one trainee, are the type of nurses I imagine my mother would have been. They show kindness that goes beyond their professional duties. They restore my faith in the idea of vocation, in the sense of complete dedication to a chosen path. Or even a path that called out to them.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about talking to your mother.
Write about the choices you have made.
Write about the place you came from.
Write about sacrifice.
Write about someone with dedication.

Continuing the search for the best custard slice. And what I think I believe.

2012-05-04T21:06:00.002+02:00

Regular readers will remember this post on custard slices. And I’ve remained impressed enough by Greggs to keep my banner photo on Facebook: it’s a snap of their cake box. Until today. Today I managed to get to Jenkins Bakery in Station Road, Port Talbot, shortly after midday and there were still half a dozen custard slices left. And they were on special: 2 for £1.50. How can a girl resist?

So, do they live up to my mother’s recommendations and my Aunty Marie’s yearning for a Jenkins custard slice when she takes a trip back from Hemel Hempstead to her home town of Llanelli (home of Jenkins Bakery)? I’m not sure. It’s difficult to remember tastes with any measure of precision. But I don’t think there's really any difference in the custard at Greggs and the custard at Jenkins. And, comparing the photos, Greggs has more of it. Where Jenkins does gain brownie points is in the pastry crust: it was still crisp (but thin and flaky) six hours later.

***

The local elections in Port Talbot yesterday produced a landslide for the Labour Party. I don’t really understand it as the people I’ve spoken to are mainly disappointed and angry about how the Labour controlled local authority have managed the town’s developments over recent years. Turn-out was low though. Less than 35% in the ward my parents live in. Perhaps pro-Labour supporters are more politically motivated?

Plaid Cymru had an interesting poster as part of their election campaign.

How many of us stick to things that are familiar to us rather than question what we believe, or what we think we believe, and re-evaluate our views and opinions?

This is something I keep coming up against as I research for Real Port Talbot. I think I know something. I think I’m familiar with an area. But when I reflect and question, and when I really open my eyes and look at my environment, I realise I’ve been hoarding received ideas, ideas I’ve accepted from other people. And what I thought I knew about some things, some places, isn’t my experience or my reality.

This is both revelatory and disturbing. Honesty, particularly self-honesty, is rarely comfortable.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about searching for something.
Write about the memory of a particular taste.
Write about what you think you believe.
Write about breaking away.
Write about a time when you were honest.

Pies to live for

2012-04-27T17:57:00.000+02:00

I’ve mentioned The Etymologicon before (one of my first Kindle purchases). It has to be one of the most entertaining books I’ve ever read. How about this, from the section ‘Beastly Foreigners’, all about the English’s predilection for slandering their neighbours:

The Welch are said to be so remarkably fond of cheese, that in cases of difficulty their midwives apply a piece of toasted cheese to the juana vita [gates of life] to attract and entice the young Taffy, who on smelling it makes most vigorous efforts to come forth. Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811

It creates an alarming picture in my imagination: a kind of Roald Dahl/ Meet the Midwife/Hammer House of Horror combo that I really don’t want to pursue. I also now feel a little reluctant to admit that I am ‘remarkably’ fond of cheese so I shall head in the direction of pies instead.

Meet the Ron Evans classic pie: mince and onion. Ron Evanshas been making these pies, well, not the current Ron and not these three pies specifically, in Port Talbot since 1926. I keep promising to take some home to Kent but the last couple of trips have seen me travelling back on a Sunday or Monday. But my next return journey will be on a weekday so I’ll be making a pit-stop at the Taibach shop on my way to the M4. Crisp pastry, a seasoned, saucy filling: pies to live, as opposed to die, for. I’m not that fond of the local moniker, a ‘Runny Ron’: more of a Benny Hill/Anthony Worrall Thompson combo that I’d also prefer not to pursue.

I had very good pies at my life writing course, Life Matters, at Mendham Mill (organised by Rochelle Scholar of Mendham Writers) a couple of weeks ago too. Steak and Ale, courtesy of Bronwen, cook and nurturer extraordinaire, who kept us all magnificently fed and watered from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime.

Home-made with love.

***

I haven’t spent as much time as this in Port Talbot for many, many years and I might be enjoying the town now more than I ever did when I lived here, particularly its plethora of cafés and food shops. This morning I headed off to one highly recommended venue for a mid-morning pasty snack. I even took a picture of it, all warm and cosy inside its torn open paper bag, on the dashboard of my car (it was raining) before I took that first tantalising bite. Oh. Dear. No. Bad pasty.

Too much thick pastry and nowhere nearly enough seasoning. In my opinion, of course. Other people will love them I’m sure.

I suppose that’s the risk of a recovered enthusiasm: idealism and self-manufactured illusions can give way to disappointment. But that’s reality. And that’s what Real Port Talbot has to be: warts and beauty spots. And I’m sure most people here will agree we have a pretty good supply of both. But for dinner tonight it’s all beauty: thanks to Ron Evans.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about making fun of someone.
Write about pies.
Write about someone who cares.
Write about being disappointed.
Write about what is beautiful.

Blogsplash: my most beautiful thing

2012-04-24T08:23:00.000+02:00

Thank you Fiona and Kaspa from Writing Our Way Home for another inspirational online project: a blogsplash on my most beautiful thing.

It is never constant. The day can reveal it, then retrieve it. I might not own it: a sunset, words spoken by a child, a smile. Beauty can fade, become functional, decay. Sometimes, it reminds me it is there. Or makes me rethink what beauty really is.

a timeless teazle

The common teazle: dipsacus sylvestris. A thorny plant found on waste ground. Old English: tǣsel; related to Old High German: zeisala, teasel, Norwegian: tīsl, undergrowth, tīsla, to tear to bits.

A piece of my hometown preserved in resin; all thorns and raggedness capturing the light on a wooden windowsill. Today, it is my most beautiful thing.

Thank you Hafod Grange Paperweights, Goytre, Port Talbot, for making beautiful things.

Fiona's new novel, The Most Beautiful Thing, is available free on Kindle on 24th and 25th April.

Off Spooting. And writing prompts.

2012-04-20T12:08:00.000+02:00

The Port Talbot Old and New Facebook page is a regular meeting place for me now. We share and discuss our memories, complaints, events, concerns, photographs and research. Sometimes I learn things about the town that come as a surprise. I might not be able to reference them in Real Port Talbot - due out next year - (RPT won't be a local history book, or a guide book, or a memoir, but it does draw on all of those things) but they still add to my relationship with the town and might even spring open a new research direction for me.

A post this morning, started by Brenda Turner, has done just that, and thanks to a photo added by Nigel Eley, I am now on a mission. A Razor Clam mission. Or spoots, as Brenda calls them.

(Aside: I Googled spoots and found this great blog, Gastrobeach (how good a title is that?) and here's their post on spoots: These spoots are made for wok-ing. I wish I'd thought of that first.)

My dad used to dig up razor clams when the tide was out on Aberafan Beach and use them for fishing bait. I've seen them used in a couple of trendy dishes during the course of the Masterchef series but hadn't thought of cooking them myself, until now.

I think I'm going to need a fisherman to help me out here though. At the moment I have visions of sprinkling salt at the little bubble holes in a patch of wet sand and waiting for a razor clam to shoot upwards and for me to catch it like a baton. Maybe. Maybe not.

But I have a recipe, courtesy of Brenda, who, although I only know her via Facebook, sounds like an expert forager, past and present:

I soak them in lightly salted water, then use this method for cooking, still in their shells, oh and garlic, parsley and a splash of white wine doesn't hurt. A nice way of doing them is in a ribbed steak griddle pan. Get the pan fairly hot and then angle the spoots into the spars of the griddle and it will help keep them closed for long enough. Cook them for a minute to 90 seconds in butter and wine, then take the spoots out and put the pan back on the heat, reduce the juices and add butter and chopped herbs. Serve them as they are, with just the spoots and a little of the juice. And get away from the idea that it has to be piping hot to serve, that’s often when you ruin the fish.

There weren't any photos on Gastrobeach so I googled again and found these, courtesy of Galloway Wild Foods, another great blog.

spoots or razor clams

There's no getting away from the fact that they do look better clothed.

marinated spoots

I know what you're thinking, and you're right: a bit penile. Nothing that a sharp knife can't remedy. Sorry, guys.

Now all I need is a patient, friendly fisherman. If I go down to the Prom and Pier in search of one I hope I don't give the wrong impression. Once, when I was staying with friends in a small town near Atlanta, Georgia, USA, I offered to help the log-man unload and stack the logs from his pick-up. I had no idea of the impression this offer to help had made on him until he returned in his pick-up truck the next day, wearing his best dungarees, checked shirt and baseball cap, and invited me for a ride into the Appalachians, which was probably the rural-Georgian equivalent of a marriage proposal.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about belonging.
Write about a photograph you remember.
Write about sand.
Write about patience.
Write about going on a date with someone you don't know.

Tastes of yesterday

2012-04-12T21:06:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow I'm driving to Norfolk to lead a life writing course at Mendham Mill. We'll talk about what it means to write from life, what the issues are surrounding the sharing of personal and deeply felt events. We'll uncover memories and discuss ways we can shape them on the page.

There's something about tastes and smells that evokes vivid memories. Do you remember this?

I wasn't a fan of lollies. Not even a Mivi whose icy skin covered a wadge of vanilla ice-cream. I preferred 99s or Oyster Shells. At a push I'd have a milk lolly which was more like ice-cream than lolly. Or a wafer: a rectangle of Wall's ice-cream between two thin boards. There was a right way to assemble your wafer. Open the wrapping on the ice-cream block and lay it ice-cream face down on one wafer. Take off and discard the rest of the paper wrapping, add the second wafer to make your 'sandwich'. Don't let anyone tell you there's another way.

There's another photo I came across in my hungry writer album that takes me back to childhood. I wrote about my dad's green beans here. But here's a poem from many years ago when I first started writing.

Bean Picking

for my father

When the jungle of leaves

dropped their scarlet blossoms

we waited for them to grow

at first invisible against the green

but in August we pushed

between the rows with a colander

and your orders to leave the small

and not to miss the big.

The coarse underside of leaves

grazed our bare shoulders, sun

dribbled through the overlaps.

We smelt hot, uncooked beans

and tugged them from their stalks,

some solid bodied, plumping

along their length, others curling

like witches’ fingernails.

In the kitchen you topped, tailed,

and pared the spines away.

Just a plate of these’ll do meyou used to say,

with butter and a drop of pepper.

At the end of Summer

you saved twelve maybe twenty

moist red hearts

to harden in brown paper.

As a poem it has weaknesses. I can see that now. But I am still fond of its simple honesty. And honesty and directness are qualities I want to have more and more in my writing. And I want to recognise them in other people's words too. So many poems in my first poetry collection relied heavily on what I call 'literary fireworks': clever linebreak, extended metaphor, imagery designed to startle. I'm aiming for a quieter approach these days. Not that it makes the crafting of the work any easier though: simplicity doesn't mean an absence of effort. Remember what Fred Astaire said?

If it doesn’t look easy, you aren’t working hard enough.

Hungry writing prompts

Write about what frightens you.
Write about buying ice-cream.
Write about growing vegetables.
Write about what you like to read.
Write a list of simple things.

Fish on Fridays

2012-04-06T00:57:00.003+02:00

I remember that we had fish for dinner quite often on Fridays when I was a kid. Usually bread-crumbed plaice. And chips. My mother kept her chip pan under the sink, filled with white lard that melted to a hot, golden slick and made the most delicious chips.

I don’t think we had fish for any religious reasons. We weren’t Catholic or Anglican and avoiding the meat of four-footed creatures on the last day of the week. Maybe it was because fish and Friday started with the same letter. I think ‘four-footed’ started me on this line of thought. And we used to have sandwiches on Saturday too. Maybe it was just habit.

Today is Good Friday so perhaps there are even more people eating fish than on any other Friday of the year. And after stalking the aisles of Tesco in Port Talbot, considering their Finest Breadcrumbed Chicken with Herb and Lemon on a first and second pass, I plumped for fish too: white and smoked cod for a fish pie.

More and more I want to know exactly what I’m eating. And while starting from scratch can be time-consuming I know I’m going to enjoy it more and feel better after eating it rather than dissecting an anonymous slip of chicken and some dodgy emulsifiers, trying to convince myself it's not too bad. I want real food.

I’ve jogged a little further down the Real Port Talbot road over the last couple of weeks too: more notes and photos that I’ll need to write up and assemble when I get back to Kent. This Easter weekend is the first anniversary of Michael Sheen’s Passion play, a staggering community play that unravelled on the streets of Port Talbot over 3 days in April 2011, and there’s an exhibition in the Aberafan Shopping Centre, a book launch on Saturday and, on Sunday night, the world premiere of the Gospel of Us (a film by Dave Mckean created from the original live footage) with a personal appearance by Michael Sheen.

I watched The Passion online from my home in France last year. It was alarming, intriguing, moving and inspiring. But the ‘memory’ weekend is equally as astonishing, cataloguing on display boards around the Shopping Centre people’s memories and experiences of the event: photos, poems, statements, paintings, needlework. Someone once said to me that Port Talbot is the death of culture, that no-one in the town is interested in art. They couldn’t be more wrong.

But what I have noticed is that artists in Port Talbot don’t make a big fuss of themselves and their work. There’s enjoyment and passion for what they do but there’s no self-indulgence. They’re happy to talk about it but there’s no pretence. Perhaps because it’s often art that springs from a sense of community, art that has its source in the environment.

And The Passion was a beacon for this kind of art: ordinary people working with professional actors and the National Theatre of Wales on the town’s streets and mountains and beach. It blended the dramatic with the every day, memory with imagination. It created a space for the seemingly impossible to happen: both in the denouement of the theatrical event and how, in its aftermath, it seemed to reawaken a stifled pride in the town and encouraged action and creativity.

But back to fish pie. My niece reminds me I made this for her when she stayed with me in Kent in the 1990s, years before she had her own children. Her daughter is seven tomorrow, her little boy is five later in the year. I still have to shake myself sometimes to realise she’s a grown woman with a family and not still the little girl who made sandcastles with me on Aberafan Beach.

Fish Pie

This is going to be one of those vague recipes as I have never weighed anything. The best thing to do is decide how many people you’re cooking for and work from there.

skinned and boned fish: half smoked and half plain. I used smoked and white cod today, enough for four people

milk

two hard-boiled eggs, chopped

a lemon

parsley

potatoes

Poach the fish in half a pint of milk, adding a slice of onion and a few curls of fresh lemon peel, until it’s just cooked.
Drain, keeping the milk to one side and chucking out the onion and peel.
Flake the fish and add the chopped egg, chopped parsley and a good squeeze of lemon juice.
Make a thick white sauce with the poaching milk, starting with a flour and butter roué.
Add enough to the fish mixture to make it nice and saucy – see 1^st photograph above.
Top with buttery, mashed potatoes and cook for about 20 or 25 minutes until the peaks are crisp.

I can show you the ‘ready for the oven’ pie but not the ‘ready to eat’ one because I was overly ready to eat it and forgot to take a photo. But I’m sure you can imagine the crispy bits.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about fish and chips
Write about Friday.
Write about the place where you were born.
Write about a work of art that has inspired you.
Write about getting older.

A baguette with Hannibal (that's Lecter not H of the elephants)

2012-03-30T15:07:00.005+02:00

Probably the best baguette in the world.

And that comes from someone who lived in France for 4 years. And yes, I had some of the best bread ever during that time but I would have never been offered a hot demi-baguette packed with shredded roast pork and sage and onion stuffing. I know, even the thought of it makes you go weak at the knees doesn’t it? Sunday lunch in a sandwich.

Repeating the baguette experience is a short hop for me right now as I’m home in Port Talbot, Wales. 'Baguettes To Go' is in Taibach, home of Anthony Hopkins. This baguette would convert Hannibal Lecter.

The best baguette in the world (probably) needs to be accompanied by the best coffee in the world. And Tambini’s near the Tollgate Park in Margam presses the probably button too, even in a polystyrene cup. Milky, sweet, hot and no foam.

The take-away approach is essential in the heat-wave that’s cosseting the whole country this week. It’s weather that makes us want to hold up our pasty winter skin to the sun and say ‘(h)eat me’. We are glad to be alive. A condition that’s brought into stark relief in the graveyard at Margam Abbey.

What is it about old graveyards that attracts us? I think it’s the stories here, the ones you read behind the lines of the inscriptions. How do people survive the death of three young children in the space of 5 years? Who are the people whose names have worn away from the 16^th and 17^th century stones that have been laid to make paths between the graves? There’s the remnant of a date here, an initial there. The rest we have to fill in for ourselves.

I eat my baguette outside the abbey wall in front of the war memorial. More stories. And evidence of qualities I am not sure I possess. But I can write about them. Maybe that helps in some way to keep them alive.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about what's good for you right now.
Write about heat.
Write about takeway food.
Write about a grave.
Write about the qualities you don't possess.

Good reads and cake

2012-03-22T16:54:00.001+01:00

Those of you who are linked to me via Facebook will know of my conversion to Kindle. Not just any old conversion, but a real evangelical clapping in the aisles Hallelujah! conversion. I’m not going to try and persuade any hardline ‘I’m sticking to books’ people among you about the delights of being a Kindle owner. I will only say: I once was like you are now : )

Every day there’s a Kindle deal, usually a 99p download for a novel, or reference book or autobiography/biography. I've bought about one a week so far and I've recently stockpiled three for my month long beach and bookshop retreat in South Florida in May:

Now All Roads Lead to France, The Last Years of Edward Thomas, Matthew Hollis

The Sacrifical Man, Ruth Dugdall

Cham, Jonathon Trigell

I nice cross-section of theme and tone there, I think.

I also bought Aric Davis’s Nickel Plated but after reading the first chapter I just had to carry on reading to the end. It’s supposed to be a teen novel – the main protagonist is only twelve - although the principal theme of paedophilia is pretty heavy, and scary in places too. I found that I had to suspend disbelief about Nickel’s age and if this is ever made into a movie (it should be) a slightly older actor would probably carry it more effectively. And the ease with which he trawls the internet for sensitive information is perhaps a little exaggerated. But it’s still a snappy and sharply written story. I hope there’s a sequel.

What warms me even more to Nickel is that the kid knows how to eat. Okay, he eats a bunch of fast food too – pizza rolls, chicken dippers, PB&J sandwiches – but he knows they’re rubbish. He'd rather go out and have Thai food or top quality steak but his circumstances (I won’t give away anything in case you decide to read it) make that a little tricky.

I’m off to Wales for two weeks next Monday. Gravestones, swans, an old WW2 tank and Michael Sheen are on the menu. I also need to make some welshcakes as I was driving between Wales and England on 1^st March and missed my annual bake-up.

But I did make cakes last week. Cake that works for dessert as well as standard ‘slice of with a coffee’ eating. I think the original recipe is Nigella’s but I fiddle with it depending on what I have and don’t have.

Clementine Cake

375 grams of whole clementines (I’ve used as much as 400 grams)

250 grams of ground almonds (last time I was short 70 grams so I topped up with fine oatmeal)

225 grams of sugar (white or golden or light brown)

a heaped teaspoon of baking powder (once, I forgot to put it in)

6 eggs

You probably get the mix and match picture now.

Cover the clementines with water, bring to the boil and simmer for 2 hours making sure they don’t boil dry. When they’ve cooled, take out any stalky bits and pips and puree what’s left, skin and all.

Beat the 6 eggs, mix in the almonds, sugar and baking powder and then add the clementine puree. It will be sloppy – don’t worry.

I’ve used a big 9” spring-form tin and I’ve used a smaller 7½” tin and I’ve made little cupcakes. But whichever you choose you MUST line the tins with paper or use paper cases. The quantity of sugar in the cake makes it susceptible to burning and the paper forms a barrier.

The mixture also doesn’t rise that much so you can fill the little paper cases quite close to the rim.

Cook at Gas no.5 or 190° electric for up to an hour but check after 40 minutes.

Crème fraiche is a good choice. Or Grand Marnier flavoured buttercream icing is pretty lush too.

And it forms part of your 5-a-day. In my book.

Hungry Writer Prompts

Write about reading on holiday.

Write about changing beliefs.

Write about being twelve years old.

Write visiting a grave.

Write about fiddling.

What blokes say, dodgy chicken, and a shotgun

2012-03-16T12:37:00.003+01:00

As if we didn’t have enough of DIY and house renovation during 4 years in France, Tony has recently changed a couple of cupboards in the kitchen here to two large pan drawers. We had these deep wide drawers in the French kitchen and they remove that ‘kneeling down and clattering around in the back of the cupboard for a saucepan lid’ activity. I’m not saying I couldn’t have lived without them but Tony was up for doing it.

It wasn’t quite as straightforward as you might imagine because our yellow kitchen has been discontinued by B&Q so while he could buy the drawer units it was a case of having to make the drawer fronts out of MDF then matching the colour with matt paint and varnish.

Job done : )

‘I can’t fit all the same stuff back in,’ I said aloud, more to myself than anything else. The drawers aren’t as deep as the cupboard shelves and I was left with a couple of baking trays and a saucepan after I’d put in as much as I could.

Tony looked over my shoulder. ‘Do you need all that stuff?’ he said.

I looked at him. ‘Only a bloke would say that,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

I rest my case.

I haven’t been doing much cooking. And the one meal I did cook a week ago ended in disaster. The new potatoes cooked to a mush. The carrots boiled dry and burnt. And the free-range corn fed chicken had a strange red and fatty patch of meat in the breast. After looking at it and poking it, to make sure it didn’t move, we decided that the chicken might have been bruised while it was alive. We ate mashed new potatoes with the other half of the chicken breast and green beans, logically aware that it was okay, but not really enjoying it. Not one of my more successful meals and probably down to my total immersion in writing up sections for Real Port Talbot around the prep for dinner.

We decided not to risk another lapse of attention last weekend and went out in the car driving aimlessly around the east Kent countryside until Tony saw a sign for Ringlestone.

‘All my friends used to talk about the Ringlestone Inn in the 1960s,’ he said. ‘It was run by a couple of women with a shotgun.’

So, of course, we went.

It’s 16^th century. It’s pretty, architecturally full of character. I love the uneven flagstones that track the footsteps of centuries across the bar floor. The wood-burner in the inglenook is gorgeous too. There were two women sitting on either side of it when we arrived and after 10 minutes they got up and swapped chairs so they could toast the other side of their bodies.

Maybe it was the woman who came up to us at the bar just as we were ordering drinks and asked us, with as much charm as a medieval innkeeper whose prize pig had just been poached, to move our car as she was expecting a delivery of calor gas. It was Sunday. There wasn’t a ‘No Parking’ sign next to the fence.

While Tony nipped out to shift it I ordered a bottle of cider for him and a sherry for me. Why the sherry, I’m not quite sure. I think I had an attack of ‘oldy worldy English pub syndrome’. So maybe it was that. I’d have liked something dry – a fino, a pale amontillado – but all they had was Harvey’s Bristol Cream and I was stuck on the sherry road now.

‘Would you like a double?’ the bargirl asked and I declined.

But when she brought the little balloon glass over there was barely a lick of sherry at the bottom.

Blimey,’ I said, laughing, ‘I think I’d better have that double!’

She shuffled over to the bottle again with her head down. The couple next to me waiting to be served coughed and looked around anxiously. I remembered I was in the Home Counties. Spontaneous expressions of emotion are frowned upon.

‘That’ll be £9.90’, the bargirl said.

Holy crap! A cider and a sherry, a tenner?! Have I been in France that long?

Remembering what Tony had said about the shotgun I didn’t complain, though I needn’t have worried. The mother and daughter, Flo (Ma) and Dora Gasking, have long gone. They gave up the pub, according to the two badly framed newspaper articles on the wall, when it was auctioned in the late 1960s but the stories about the shotgun appear to be true. Something that started with ousting a bunch of unruly bikers became a trademark eccentric reputation and people flocked there to be part of it.

We decide not to eat at the Ringlestone where I’m sure the food is fine but eating out isn’t just about that, is it? It’s about the welcome, the service too. And character. And I don’t mean old bricks and beams. The Ringlestone is supposed to be haunted. I hope it’s Ma Gasking. The place needs a bit of spunk.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about emptying a cupboard.

Write about a colour.

Write about the kinds of silences you can have during a meal.

Write about something old.

Write about the places you would haunt.

When the world moved at 33 and 45 rpm

2012-03-09T13:34:00.000+01:00

I bought my first ‘music centre’ in 1980. Those of you old enough will remember that music centres were large, rectangular constructions incorporating the turntable, a tape deck and radio. Bang & Olufsen was the dream brand – I remember the glossy magazine shots of those streamlined beasts that took up the same amount of space as a small dining room table.

My music centre was the first ‘upright’ one on the market, produced by National Panasonic. It had its own wood effect and glass door cabinet: the music centre sat on top and I kept my LP’s in the cabinet below. I brought it with me to Kent in 1985 and it's been with me ever since. The cabinet has long gone, I don’t have tapes anymore and I hadn’t bothered replacing the batteries for the radio station memory in years but every now and then I’d pull out an LP from its cardboard sleeve, cue the arm of the record deck and listen to Carole King’s 'Tapestry', or Fleetwood Mac’s 'Rumours', or Meatloaf’s 'Bat Out of Hell' on vinyl.

LPs, tapes, record sleeves, deck, arm, vinyl: it’s another language.

I even took it to France when we moved there in 2008, and it came back with me last October but I only got around to setting up the speakers and auxiliary CD player yesterday.

ERR wasn’t a good start on the CD player’s digital read-out: it must have received an irreparable clunk in the move. When Carole King kept repeating the same phrase from ‘You’ve got a friend’, over and over again, I first thought ‘dust on the stylus’ (Note to self: add 'stylus' to Language Library of Nostalgia), or even a scratch on the record. But no, the motorised record arm was sticking an inch or so into play and the only thing that would budge it was a sharp tap which kind of defeated the whole point of playing the record.

The music centre cost an exorbitant £500 in 1980 – the days before hi-fi (Language Library of Nostalgia??) became a relatively cheap commodity – and I think I’ve had my money’s worth over 32 years. But it still feels a little sad tossing it in the back of the trailer to take to the metal tip. I know I shouldn’t need ‘things’ to remind me of good times, eventful times, life-changing times even, but it’s difficult to snip all threads.

CBS, EMI, Atlantic, Mercury, Pye, Polydor – there’s even music in the litany of record labels.

And there’s another thing that will be for ever confined to dusty romance-tinged recollection: how sweetly singles fitted into a shoebox.

Language Library of Nostalgia
single, noun: a grooved circle of plastic with the power to transport you to a different plane.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write a list of songs that are memorable for you.
Write about your first ‘big’ purchase.
Write about being stuck.
Write about cutting a thread.
Write a list of things that have meaning for you that you could fit into a shoebox.

Hearty

2012-02-29T17:55:00.002+01:00

Hearty. My Dutch friends used it when they were talking about breakfast.
'We'll have a light breakfast and leave before 9,' said Adrian.'
Toon didn't agree. 'I think we'll need a hearty breakfast,' he said. 'We have a long drive ahead of us.'
'Alright, a hearty breakfast then.'

It's not a word I'd ever use for breakfast. Light, maybe. Continental (reading aloud from hotel menus - I like to clarify and share information about what's available to eat). Big. Cooked. Fried. But never hearty. Hearty has a tweed jacket, green wellingtons, kedgeree and cocked-shotgun feel about it to me and there was never a lot of call for the latter on the council estate where I grew up. Unless the shot-gun was sawn-off.

But it sounds right for Toon and Adrian, perhaps because English is their second language and while they don't have a trace of accent when they speak it, and they speak it beautifully too, they occasionally use words that mother-tongue English speakers might not. But this only adds to the richness, the colourfulness, of their conversation: you only have to read what 'hearty' suggested to me to be convinced of that.

But there's another reason why the word suits them so well: they are hearty themselves in the sense of their relationship being full of heart, of kindness and consideration towards each other. When I've spent time with them I am aware of the love that surrounds them like light filling a room.

I don't think I know many other couples like that. Perhaps it's partly due to them meeting later in life.
Toon once told me that he'd prepared himself for being alone in middle and old age, hadn't expected to find this kind of happiness.

I like real love stories. Love stories that bloom in details of ordinary life. The kind of love UA Fanthorpe talks about in her poem, 'Atlas': There is a kind of love called maintenance,/ Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;/ Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget/ The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs/

The kind of love that makes you a hearty breakfast when you need one:

My Sunday breakfast, with love from Tony

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write a memory about a friend.
Write about speaking a different language.
Write about a heart.
Write a list of the ordinary tasks that fill your day.
Write about having breakfast.

Sweet Home Port Talbot

2012-02-24T10:44:00.000+01:00

This might be the street of my hungry writer dreams, right here in my hometown.

Riverside Café
Gossip Café

Sweetmans

Jenkins Bakers and Café

Greggs

Lynda’s Café Bar

Ferrari’s Café

Selections Coffee Shop

All within 500 yards of each other and I’m only half way up and yet to check out the other side. Ask any writer and they’ll glaze over (a bit like a fresh doughnut) at the thought of being tucked at a table with coffee and cake, a pen and a notebook, a little condensation on the windows maybe, anonymous chatter and the random clatter of cutlery against china.

Today I’m on a mission: my mother has told me that Jenkins is renowned for custard slices. They’re a family firm from Llanelli, in West Wales, going back to 1921 when Lizzie Jenkins opened ‘The Unique Café’ on New Dock Road. Their slogan at the time was ‘Every bite – pure delight’ and even though the business has since expanded to 25 retail shops, including this one in Port Talbot, it is still being run by a third generation today.

Of course, tucked in the corner of my mind is an awareness of my mother’s bias: she’s Llanelli born and even though she left her home town nearly 60 years ago she’s still a dyed in the wool Scarlets supporter (the Llanelli Welsh Rugby Union team).

But the Scarlets have dropped a few points today: not a custard slice in sight. There are a couple of concoctions behind the glass case labelled ‘non-dairy jam and cream slice’. If it’s not dairy, how can it be cream? But then I remember those gargantuan Cream Horns of my childhood – thick,papery, hollow pastry horns filled with a sticky cloud of sweet fluff...

Yes, obviously I am

But nostalgia does not sway me and I pop a few doors along where Greggs have custard slices that look as if they’ve been putting in gym-time pumping up their fillings. So Greggs get my £2.10 and 3 custard slices and I get a box, the lid of which advertises my weakness, that’s designed for 6 cakes though I doubt it would take the weight of 6 custard slices: I have to carry it in two hands to stop it from bending. These are more hunk than slice.

In fact they’re so big me and my mother share one between us after dinner. ‘The custard is nice,’ she says. ‘Not too sweet.’

The Gregg's custard hunk

And she’s right. I might just go for another half. But she’s still waving her Llanelli supporter’s scarf. I was probably too late for the custard slices at Jenkins, she tells me. They’re so popular they would have sold out by three in the afternoon.

I have 5 more days here, more than enough time for an early morning custard slice expedition, I believe.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write a list of shops that would exist in your perfect imaginary street.
Write about different kinds of noise.
Write about what delights you.
Write about carrying something precious.
Write about getting up early in the world.

The path to addiction (and some maths)

2012-02-16T19:47:00.000+01:00

I have discovered a piece of France that evaded me while I lived there. But not because I wasn't paying attention. It somehow even managed to evade my French sister-in-law, Manuela, for 38 years. She discovered it when some French language students from the west coast gave it to her as a gift when they stayed at her home in Swansea, South Wales. She gave it to me.

This post should come with a warning of addiction. There is no way back once you start. Forget licking out the bottom of a large bag of Kettle Crisps, forget 'oh, just one more then' when the box of Ferrero Rocher comes around for the 8th time. Whatever your guilty pleasure, it will fade into insignificance if you go any further. Don't come crying to me in a month's time. You have been warned.

But let's do this slowly.

the batter

What are the things you were allowed to cook as a child? The first things I remember preparing were the batter for Yorkshire puddings and mint sauce. Late Sunday morning in the kitchen of our council house: the condensation thickening on the window, beans kept green with a dash of bicarbonate of soda, the roast topside or silverside of beef, tied with string, under a dome of tinfoil.

The mint came from our garden and I washed it, dried it and chopped it with the thin blade of a silver handled knife, one of my mother's wedding presents. When the chop was fine enough I added a little bit of caster sugar. Then I chopped it again, added more sugar, before scraping it all into a little glass jug and adding malt vinegar to a level my mother approved of.

My mother once told a family friend from Yorkshire that I made the batter for the Yorkshire pudding. 'But what kind of flour do you use?' he asked me with an air of suspicion and condescension. Are all Yorkshire men this threatened by Welsh ten-year-old amateur Yorkshire pudding batter makers?

You can use plain or self-raising for our silky batter recipe which calls for very little of it - a mere 100 grams.

Do you recognise it? Please don't mistake les moules for mussels. That would lead to all kinds of unpleasantness.

I also helped to make fairy cakes when my mother had a Saturday baking session. When did fairy cakes submit to the American 'cup' cakes? The term must derive from the measuring cups American cooks use. We don't use cups here in the UK. A lot of us don't even use grams. We use real money: ounces. But the drift towards the continent is worth it in this case. Trust me.

These are the moulds (les moules) you'll need to buy.

Yes, you could substitute something else but it won't be the same. You won't get that sweet, gooey and simultaneously crisp bite of french perfection.

Listen to me and this is what you will have in a few hours time: Cannelés Bordelais

And now for the maths. Take 64 cannelés, deduct 8 (for the neighbour), divide by 2 (people) over 16 (hours). How many remain? Your answer may well be different from mine:

You'll find the recipe below the writing prompts. Steady now.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about addiction.
Write about giving.
Write about an adult questioning a child.
Write about the influence of another culture on your life.
Write about counting: sheep, fingers and toes, your blessings, anything you like.

Cannelés Bordelais

half a litre of milk, pinch of salt, 2 eggs plus 2 extra yolks, a teaspoon of good vanilla essence, a tablespoon of rum (I used Grand Marnier), 100 grams of flour, 250 grams of caster sugar, 50 grams of butter

Bring the milk to the boil with the vanilla and butter.
While that's happening, mix the flour and sugar, then add all the eggs and mix together.
Add the boiling milk and mix gently but thoroughly to achieve a smooth, silky batter.
Let it cool. Add the rum, stir, and put it in the fridge for at least an hour.

Put a baking tray in the oven and preheat it at its maximum temperature. My gas oven goes to no. 9.

Melt some more butter and brush the insides of the moulds.

Fill the moulds, to about two thirds full, with the chilled batter. Place them on the hot tray and cook for 10 minutes at that high heat.

Lower the thermostat to no.6 (180 electric) and cook for a further 40 minutes.

They should have a lovely brown crust, but don't worry they'll still be soft inside.

It's easier if you take them out of the moulds while they're still warm.

If you halve the quantity above you'll have enough for 2 moulds of 18. Otherwise you'll have enough for a second batch. What a hardship.

Back to school

2012-02-08T19:00:00.000+01:00

I walked the route between home and Tir Morfa Primary School four times a day for six years. Heading there this morning, my mind automatically re-sets itself to the early 1960s and I start counting my footsteps as I leave my parents’ house. It’s rather satisfying when, at 55 steps, I look up and realise I’m walking past 55 Chrome Avenue.

I’m visiting the school as part of my research for Real Port Talbot. There’s a mural in the Assembly Hall by the Port Talbot born artist, Andrew Vicari and I want to photograph it for the book.

The Tir Morfa mural is a product of its era – the stylised lips and eyes, the strong outlines – and perhaps more of a nostalgia trip for people like me than of any particular value to art history. It takes me back to a time of home knitted jumpers, when the toys we carried didn’t require a power source. The children feel unfamiliar to me but the faces of the women are the remembered mothers of my childhood: Mammy, Aunty Ruth, Aunty Phil, Aunty Beryl. They were the soapsuds and steam of a Monday’s laundry, the warnings of being in trouble when our fathers got home. Letting us stay up late on Friday nights for Bonanza. Women their daughters took for granted until they started to fear losing them.

I had my first school photograph taken in the Assembly Hall but it’s the Dining Hall, connecting the Infants and the Juniors, where memory overtakes me, transports me back 45 years. The long trestle tables are still there and in the room’s emptiness, its mid-morning silence, I can see the table monitors with their long spoons sharing out cottage pie and cake from oblong aluminium tins. Over-heated mashed potato. Those squares of overly sweet baked sponge with jam. I discovered gristle for the first time when I persuaded my mother to let me have school dinners for a term. I was suspicious of the startlingly yellow custard and rice pudding, their thick wrinkly skins.

Some kids didn’t complain although they had a right too when they were required to publicly announce their ‘free dinners’ status as the register was called out at the beginning of each week. And the rest of us stared at them.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about counting things.
Write about the women who lived in your street when you were young.
Write a list of things a mother does.
Write about someone serving you food in a public place.
Write about people looking at you.

Lovely ladies and the invention of the crisp sandwich

2012-01-29T22:15:00.000+01:00

I thought that the first photograph I saw on the packet of British Rail’s complimentary crisps was serendipity: these lovely acrobatic ladies on the beach advertising lightly sea salted crisps made from a variety of potato called Lady Rosetta.

But today, on my train journey back from Wales to London, the girl in the buffet car gave me the Cheese and Chive flavour, the packet decorated with another, no less lovely in their time, I’m sure, group of women:

Champions of cheese-making perhaps, or cheese-tasting, or maybe they’re the judges at a WI food market. So it seems that Tyrell’s marrying of potato variety, Lady Rosetta again, and photograph is deliberate.

I have yet to research (or Google, as we say these days!) if they make any other flavours using the same potato variety and whether those packets also bear vintage photographs of groups of women engaged in an appropriate activity. Or whether there’s a male equivalent. King Edward? Red Robin?

The first crisps of my childhood were Smith’s. They were plain in a way that kids today could not conceive of: crisp potato slices, nothing else. But there was the excitement of searching in the packet for the little twist of blue paper containing salt so you could season to your own preference. The ‘twist’ became a sachet and then that disappeared too (except for a brief revival in 1979 of Salt n'Shake) with the introduction of ready-flavoured crisps. Perhaps my early limited crisp experience has resulted in ready salted, or lightly salted, crisps remaining a favourite. Smoky Bacon, Roast Chicken, Prawn Cocktail —I tried them because of the novelty but the flavour never lived up to the promise written on the packet. They were, and maybe still are, heavy on the taste enhancers that found their way into every little gap in your teeth and hunkered there for ages afterwards.

Occasionally I had Cheese & Onion crisps. They were my mother’s favourite but she never ate them when my father was around because he didn’t like the smell.

***

Salt & Vinegar crisps were the star of one particular December afternoon just before Christmas in the mid 1960s. These were the days of milkmen, bread vans, door to door rent collections and insurance men calling round to pick up premiums and my mother always had the weekly payments ready, counted out into plastic bags and tucked into a kitchen drawer.

Aunty Beryl-next-door had already alerted her to the over-excited insurance man who’d been toasting Christmas at a number of houses as he made his way down the street and by the time he arrived at no.73 he was, to be 1960s polite, rather worse for wear, but to use the vernacular of today, completely off his face.

Drunkenness wasn’t a state I was familiar with. I vaguely understood how ‘tipsy’ revealed itself. Or, if it was a man, ‘one pint too many’. But he had attained a state of jollification I had never witnessed in an adult. And he was giving away money – big pre-decimalisation bronze pennies stamped on the tail-side with Britannia. I was enchanted and couldn’t understand why my mother insisted that I give them back.

These were also the days before drinking and driving restrictions and offering a little Christmas drink and a few crisps was de rigeur behaviour but my mother also did her best to ply him with as much black coffee as she could.

‘Let me make you a sandwich too,’ she said.

And he accepted the bread and butter and proceeded to show me how to construct a crisp sandwich. My sandwiches had always come in single varieties from a predetermined list: cheese, corned beef, cucumber, tinned salmon. They were soft and flat. But here were sandwiches breaking the rules, noisy sandwiches, their filling crushed flat in his big hands and equally as noisy in the mouth. I joined in enthusiastically.

I couldn’t wait for him to call again the following week, the funny man who made crisp sandwiches, threw pennies around the room and made me laugh.

‘Do you remember what you did last time?’ I said cheerfully, when he came into the kitchen, receiving the weight of my mother’s glare, his sheepish downward glance, and the raw slap of having said something I shouldn’t have all at the same time. The fun was over.

And so was his job. As far as I can remember someone else took over his round shortly after that. We never saw him again. If he’s still alive I wonder if he remembers that afternoon? If he does, is it with regret, embarrassment or indifference? Would it mean anything to him that his story remains with me, over 45 years later and that I smile every time I remember him?

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about a group of women all doing the same thing together.
Write about serendipity, a ‘happy accident’.
Write about a drunk.
Write about having fun as a child and having fun as an adult.
Write about your favourite sandwich.

Testing ground

2012-01-22T21:38:00.000+01:00

When I arrived in Wales this week my great-niece told me about a blindfold taste test she was due to have in school as part of their science curriculum. They’ve already done ‘scents and smells’ during which she learned that sniffing too hard at a pile of curry powder isn’t something you want to repeat.

The taste test wasn’t something she was looking forward to as a 6 year old whose tastes are rather regimented (although if anything comes with a Hello Kitty wrapper she’s more likely to try it) but the test was cancelled, much to her relief, and the class are moving onto ‘materials’ next week. I wonder if ‘Elf and Safety’ had anything to do with that?

‘Why don’t we do our own taste test?’ I suggest.
‘No,’ she says without a moment’s hesitation.
‘Come on,’ I coax. ‘I promise I’ll only give you things you’ll like.’
‘Okay,’ she says.
‘Sunday,’ I say.
‘Is that the day after tomorrow?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’

I made a list of things I know she likes and wouldn’t be alarmed to find at the end of a spoon: nutella, strawberries, grated parmesan. And then a list of things that she hasn’t tried before, or has refused to try, but I’m pretty sure will be a hit, or at least acceptable: ripe peach (without the skin), green pesto, honey. I want to respect the trust she has placed in me, a trust I wouldn’t want to shake in the slightest, but at the same time I want to encourage new experience.

But today she changed her mind. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said. So we didn’t but then she tried the dessert I made, a mixture of tastes she hadn’t tried before, so we are now back on for the Great Taste Test sometime this week. Watch this space...

This is the dessert:

If you’re a regular follower you might remember that I posted the recipe earlier this month but forgot to take a photo of the finished dish! So if you’re avoiding desserts this early in the New Year, just enjoy the photo. Or click here to make your own.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about wearing a blindfold.

Write a list of all the things you like to eat.

Write about an occasion when you did something for the first time.

Write about changing your mind.

Write about abstinence.

Home from home: Roast Lamb with Marsala

2012-01-13T12:44:00.000+01:00

I started the hungry writer in France when identifying a sense of home seemed more urgent, being much further from either Wales, the country of my birth, or England, my adopted country. Each week I tugged on a thread of memory from my childhood and pulled myself towards home.

France feels very far away now, emotionally, even though it’s only been less than three months since we moved back. I spoke to a friend in Antibes yesterday and she told me about l’hiver incroyable they’re enjoying: 18 degrees during the day and the usual Mediterranean blue sky. I thought I’d miss the easy climate, the light, the sea but the British winter has been so incroyablement mild too with lots of clear skies, and I get to see the sea every month during my trips to Wales. And there are not many better beaches than this in the world. Forget about heat, palm trees, sunbeds. I’m talking about good sand, space, the sense of being swallowed by the sea, the noise of a high tide at night hitting the sea wall.

It doesn’t matter anymore that the Steelworks is at one end. Gone are the days of jumping little oil slicks and coal dust on your journey to the shore. Stricter regulations have enabled the beach to gain a Blue Flag rating. It’s tractored and cleaned every day. It really is a heart-opening experience to stand on the Prom and breathe.

Finding home since I’ve been back has taken on a number of identities. The home I need to feel in my writing environment has eventually been achieved after living with boxes for 10 weeks with new shelving and a desk to replace ones left in France:

And I feel spoiled with homeliness as I travel between Kent and Port Talbot in South Wales too. A true home from home experience.

Foodwise, I am delving into home with lamb. There is nothing to compare to Welsh Spring lamb. I can’t even enter into a debate about it. Case closed. I’ve made this twice since I’ve been back, once for family and once just for me and Tony. Eating what you love with someone you love has to be right at the top of the list of good things to do, and the list of what makes you feel at home.

Hungry Writing prompts appear below the photos which are rather like a picture story strip so hardly need any written directions, except perhaps to say that I pour 100 ml of Marsala over the lamb at the beginning of the cooking time and another 100 ml for the last 20 minutes, then I use those juices to make a gravy.

Roast Lamb with Marsala Wine

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about the country of your birth.
Write about a winter you remember well.
Write about space.
Write about a book.
Write about someone preparing a meal.

The proof of the pudding

2012-01-04T14:07:00.000+01:00

I discovered fountains during my pre-Christmas shopping. Not the water spouting out of a stone sculpture or dancing to music kind, but the firework kind you bung in the top of a Christmas pudding and light so it resembles a bomb you might associate with the Roadrunner and Wily Coyote. You know the type – round, with Acme stamped on it and fizzing with inevitable destruction.

I know, it’s hardly traditional, and I did pick a sprig of holly in the orchard on Christmas morning all ready for the brandy flambé performance. But the firework seemed like more fun. And I’d also had a mishap with flambéing in my mother’s kitchen a couple of weeks earlier when I melted the edge of her cooker fan (sorry, Mam!).

I think 'pudding' counts as 'soft, non-flammable material'.
But I'd avoid adding brandy to a Christmas Pudding!

The fountains came in packs of three and I have one left. We liked the first fountain in the pudding so much we decided to light a second one. And this last one is destined for another pudding in the near future. Not necessarily pudding as in round and fruity but as in pudding after lunch or dinner. Dessert.

Words are fun. How we use them, where they come from, what they mean. We all have favourite words too… we do, don’t we? Some of mine are: orchard, kipper, deliverance. Don’t you just love how you feel yourself rolling out to the end of that last one as you say it?

I have treated myself to Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon. (It’s a pretty irresistible book as it is but at 99p for the Kindle edition it was a no-brainer for me.) The book springs from Mark’s Inky Fool blog and explores the strange connections between words, which brings me back to puddings.

You know the expression, ‘The proof of the pudding (is in the eating)’? Well, the use of the word proof relates to the word’s Roman origins and how the Romans used to test their theories… and found that they worked, or were found wanting.

A pudding, or dessert, that was thoroughly tested and definitely not found wanting at my dinner party on New Year’s Eve was Triple Layer Apple Crunch. Its greatest fan was a farmer friend who had three helpings; I could almost see his eyes glazing over as the pudding transported him back to nursery teas, grass tickling his little boy legs in short trousers.

For me it’s the textures of the pudding that are a great part of its success: the sweet heaviness of apple puree, a cloud of whipped cream, and the crunch of a cornflake toffee topping. Cornflakes! I hear a distant purist shriek. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

I wish I could show you the completed dessert but I’ve been annoyingly forgetful about taking photographs recently. I start out with good intentions…

…but you’re going to have to imagine the layers of whipped cream and crunchy topping. Although you can see how a glass dish is essential to the prettiness of this dessert.

I use dessert apples as there’s no need to add sugar but they do take a lot longer to cook down to a puree than cooking apples do. Add a splash of water or apple juice to the pan to get them going, and to avoid them burning, then cook very slowly, stirring occasionally. Leave the puree to cool completely before adding the cream layer.

I whip up Elmlea Double rather than a full animal fat cream as I find it a bit lighter.

For the crunchy topping, melt about 75 grams of butter with half a dozen generous tablespoons of Golden Syrup in a large saucepan. Once it’s melted pour in enough cornflakes to be completely coated in the mixture and pile on top of the cream layer quickly before they start to clump together too much.

Let the topping harden completely in the fridge. It’ll stay crunchy all day so it’s a dessert you can make quite a few hours in advance.

Now… stick in your fountain, light it, and fizzle towards your friends : )

Happy New Year!

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write a childhood memory of fireworks.
Write about setting fire to something.
Write a list of your favourite words.
Write about being irresistible.
Write about making something for a friend.

Relax, enjoy.

2011-12-23T15:24:00.000+01:00

The fridge is brimming with free range chickens and vegetables and enough Tesco Finest Wild Mushroom Filo Parcels to feed a small army. Some things are worth doing yourself (garlic and herb roast chicken and potato and celeriac dauphinoise), some things aren’t (stuffing little squares of filo pastry for hours).

Christmas is low-key at our house. We stopped buying ‘presents for everyone’ years ago and that makes life much easier. Unless 1) you can afford it, and 2) you know that someone wants something particular then Christmas presents can be a debt inducing, stress filled, disappointing activity and finale.

My present to the four people I’ll be eating with on Sunday will be a walk around the apple orchard to see the bouquet of pheasants (I just checked that on Google!) living in the wild there, followed by an afternoon of home cooked food (mushroom parcels aside), lots of laughter with a log-fire and a sparkly Christmas tree. I love Christmas trees. But real Christmas trees not joking ones. (That’s South Wales for ‘pretend’ or ‘artificial’, as in ‘Is that a real log-fire or a joking one?’)

I wish you your perfect day too whether it’s quiet or boisterous, whether it takes place this weekend or any other time over the holiday season.

Relax, enjoy.

Happy Christmas – Nadolig Llawen.

Eating with Real People

2011-12-16T11:09:00.000+01:00

Steak and roast chicken, savoury sausage and baked salmon, wine and puddings, maple fudge and a custard slice. It has been a week of eating. When I arrive at my home town of Port Talbot in South Wales, within minutes of getting off the train, it’s the first thing I organise, and then organise again. And again.

Pretty cappuccino at
Cafe Remos, Aberafan Beach

Actually, the custard slice was only half a custard slice. I shared it with my sister at Café Remos on Aberafan Beach after we’d spent a couple of hours walking around the western perimeter of the council estate where we both grew up. My new book, Real Port Talbot, will include memoir (my own and others’) as well as local history and the only way to see an area, to notice what remains, and to remember what has disappeared is to walk it. Even if the wind threatens to take off the top layer of our faces as we turn the corners of the ‘colour’ streets near the beach. And, appropriately, it’s in Scarlet Avenue that my sister confesses to forgery.

‘I only had one ticket for the Naval Club Disco,’ she says, ‘and I wanted my friend Veronica to come with me so we made another one.’

I’m impressed. She was only 12! Think of what she could have achieved if she’d capitalised on this talent.

I confess that I once stole a monkey nut from the greengrocery section at the Co-op in Fairway. I could feel the dare rising up in me as I realised it would be small enough to fit into my eight-year-old hand and I brushed my fingers over the top of the pile and closed them around one.

In the warmth of Café Remos we watch the whip of the sea and the rain slap against the plate glass windows. Opposite us a man is reading a black leather bible and making copious notes into a spiral bound notebook. I wonder what his reaction would be if he knew he was in the presence of a forger and a thief?

At this point my sister and I would like to point out that we were not encouraged by our successes in these fields and that these were our first and only attempts at deceit for material gain. And I didn’t even like monkey nuts.

12 Cafe, 37 Commercial Road, Taibach, Port Talbot

You could pass 12 Café in Taibach, a community to the east of Port Talbot town centre, and be excused for thinking that this was a contemporary café more or less like any other. It offers leather sofas at the front, plenty of bright, clean tables and chairs, and free wi-fi. All the food is prepared fresh every day as the intoxicating, savoury scent of baking proves as you enter.

I’ve come in with Allen Blethyn, a retired carpenter and joiner who discovered his passion late in life for local history, for researching the people and the places and the events that make us who we are now. Allen has shown me copper slag coping stones, chapels and old butcher’s shops and now he takes me into 12 Café because he understands that the Real Port Talbot will be just that: a real account of the town as it is now as well as a record of the past.

12 Café is a social enterprise run by West Glamorgan Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse Limited. You can read more about the project and its aims here.

While I am sure there are lots of different social enterprises providing valuable help to people and communities this one, revolving around the preparation of food, of people eating together, particularly appeals to me. The whole ethos of cooking is about transformation and understanding. It’s about self-confidence and contributing to the enjoyment of others. And one cheese and onion toastie and a café latte later it is obvious that 12 Café has all these ingredients and more.

I currently have two stamps on my loyalty card. I reckon I’ll be getting my free coffee very soon. But if you're too far away to pop into 12 Café you can Like them on Facebook and tell them what a great job they’re doing.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about something that has disappeared from your life.
Write about a crime.
Write about something you remember from your past that has affected your present life.
Write about a particular smell that you associate with a particular place.
Write about a favourite cafe.

The cooked and the cruel

2011-12-09T20:43:00.000+01:00

Where does the love of food end and cruelty begin? I’m sure there will be different boundaries among us, and contradictions too. I’ll start with myself: I will only buy free range eggs but I ate foie gras several times during my four years in France. I refuse to buy the battery chickens from the supermarket but I don’t question the source of the pork in Tesco Finest Cumberland Sausages. Actually, that sounds more like hypocrisy than contradiction.

I am reading Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith, a series of philosophical commentaries on the ordinary content of our day to day lives, from getting ready to go out, sitting at a desk, going to a party, to falling asleep at the end of the day. In the chapter, ‘Cooking and Eating Dinner’, he describes the French penchant for ortolan, a ‘delicacy’ I’d never heard of that has been illegal in France since 1999, although the laws have only been properly enforced since 2007. I should warn you that it doesn’t make for easy reading:

The ortolan – a bunting, the size of a sparrow – is trapped and incarcerated in a windowless box to be fed figs; when it has fattened, it is literally drowned in Armagnac, its minute lungs flooded with the rasping liquor. Now dead, it is plucked, roasted and served whole – bones, guts, pluck and all – with only the head to be left dangling untouched beyond the eater’s lips.

François Mitterrand, the former French president, ate ortolan at his ‘last supper’ while terminally ill with prostate cancer, with his head concealed beneath the traditional napkin. The reasons for this are disputed: it’s a messy business crunching through bones and innards; it preserves the aromas; it hides your face from God. Mitterand died eight days later.

Of course I prefer to think that my unquestioning purchase of pork sausages is on a different level to Mitterand’s ortolan feast. And perhaps, to some degree, it is if I believe the supermarket’s claims about animal welfare.

But the ortolan story has been playing on my mind since I read it.

… just as either the overripeness [pheasant, cheese] or the rawness [sushi, steak tartare] of what you serve can speak to your cultivation, to your acquired level of artistry, so cruelty can exhibit your refinement.

So what will I do the next time I’m in a restaurant and fancy ordering the foie gras? Ask if it comes from a duck or goose that hasn’t been subjected to gavage or force-feeding? Some top chefs, including Anthony Bourdain, have supported foie gras production from humanely treated, properly raised ducks so, in theory, it should be available. But could I be sure? No. I’ve said in other posts on this blog that the world needs more kindness.

There’s a Michelin star restaurant in Reading, England, called L’Ortolan although the little bunting on their logo looks quite happy and there’s no trace of the barbaric dish on any of their menus. Still, personally, I’d think about a name change.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about the one item of food you couldn’t do without.
Write about an instance of cruelty.
Write about ‘a last supper’.
Write about watching someone eat.
Write about an aspect of yourself that you don’t like.

Buffets and fiction can change your life

2011-12-02T21:19:00.002+01:00

I am reading A.D.Miller’s Snowdrops and now I never ever want to go to Moscow. I know it’s not a Rough Guide; it’s not a Lonely Planet traveller’s insights. I know it’s fiction, a story created in the author’s imagination, but its descriptions and portrayal of people and everyday life are so convincing.

In an interview on the Man Booker website, Miller says: The kinds of crime that the book describes, the pervasive corruption it depicts and the awful vulnerability of anyone without powerful connections are real, as people who have spent time in Moscow will recognise. The details of the Metro, the dacha, the night-life and so on are, I hope, true to life.

No hoping needed. He has absolutely nailed ‘true to life’. But apart from the off-putting crime and corruption, the blood-letting bureaucracy and the cold that freezes the hairs in your nostrils and glues your mobile phone to the palm of your hand, there’s the food:

On the desk was the kind of Russian party spread I always dreaded, as inedible as it was extravagant… all sweaty fish, jellied and unidentifiable bits of animals, Russian chocolate broken into clumps, blinis that were getting cold…

I can empathise with the ‘party spread’. In France, invitations to dinner seemed to be rather stress-inducing formal affairs for their hosts. There was never such a thing as a casual invitation to ‘come and have something to eat with us’. In Antibes it always meant the whole shebang of pre-dinner drinks accompanied with variations on puffy cheese balls, followed by a shift to the dinner table for a dressed salad, a main course, a cheese course, a dessert, their accompanying wines, and then another (heavier) shift back to the salon for digestifs and chocolates. So the popular alternative was to invite people for a ‘party spread’ or, as they called it, un apero dinetoire.

This was a slightly earlier event than dinner that involved champagne or wine and a range of small snacks handed from guest to guest in a way that reminded me of the childhood 'pass the parcel' game, each tray diminishing in servings as it did the rounds.

I could never work out how preparing half a dozen finicky snacks per person was less trouble than plonking a big dish of spaghetti Bolognese in the middle of the table, along with a crusty baguette and a couple of bottles of red wine and saying, Servez-vous! But the french didn't seem open to that kind of British informality. They had their own, a variety of foods you’d never choose to eat together in one sitting: thick cured salmon with a dollop of warm crème fraiche, a little plastic glass of cold carrot soup, saucisson, brioche smeared with duck paté. Think compulsory food tasting and you'd be getting close.

More food from Snowdrops:

We ordered some vodka and ‘herring in a fur coat’ (marinated fish buried under a sludge of beetroot and mayonnaise).

There’s something unpleasantly visceral about fish and fur in the same phrase. It reminds me of a money dealer I used to work with in Jersey who, if you came in with a killer hangover, would torture you with the image of a chunk of fatty bacon tied to a thick piece of wool being dangled in your mouth.

But back to Snowdrops and its ability to put me off going to Moscow and, if I’m honest, Russia in general. Is it shallow, or naïve, to allow fiction to have this kind of effect on me? Does this clump me with the 50% of British people who, Google tells me, believe Sherlock Holmes was a real person? I’d obviously prefer to think that it doesn’t and that it’s the novel’s emotional intensity, how hypnotised I am by the narrator’s life and experiences, that is contributing to my current negative response to the city.

The Russian women in Snowdrops tend to be young, hard and beautiful. I am convinced by them too. They fit into the landscape, the weather, the economy. And so far (I’m two thirds of the way through the novel) I don’t like any of them either! But I can't recommend this book enough for the insidious way it has taken over my mind, how it keeps me hooked from page to page with its understated dramatic development, and for the quality of its writing too.

The pavement looked like it had been doused in chilled gravy, says the narrator. The streets smelled of beer and revolution.

This week I'm a hungry reader.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about the first story you remember reading.
Write about snow.
Write about an invitation to dinner.
Write about something you used to believe.
Write about someone you don’t like.