‘More pepper, ladies?’ I’d rather have broad beans May 22, 2009

Last weekend. Paris. Too lazy even to open a guide book, I and my friend (a fellow mother of small children – ie punch drunk with exhaustion and a need for essential oils, complimentary shower caps and an evening in front of the Eurovision Song Contest)  asked at the hotel front desk for a restaurant recommendation. 

This is risky. The second night, we hit dross with La Rotonde where I felt like we’d wandered into that Victoria Wood sketch where the waiter looms leeringly over two sunburnt female holidaymakers with a giant pepper grinder – ‘More pepper, ladies’ – flirting patronisingly in search of a tip, which obviously being British and terrified of offending, we gave anyway. But the first night we hit gold with Le Timbre, a tres intime little place who’s English chef (I know, alarm bells did initially ring) wowed us with the usual French fare of snails and duck, but most importantly a fillet of cod on a bed of succulent broad beans of the brightest emerald, coaxed to perfection with a smattering of lardons. 

We strolled through the Jardins du Luxembourg, wondered why Parisians in the 6th arrondisement need so many children’s clothes shops when, by the looks of it, there have no actual children, and marvelled at how very French France is (queues outside patisseries! old women looking like Brigitte Bardot!  little dogs!  little dog shit!). 

But, safely returned on the Eurostar, it’s those broad beans that I keep thinking about. This is because I have very little capacity for high culture and a very high capacity for food. However pretty the Georges Pompidou Centre is, you can’t eat it. But mainly it’s because the broad beans in my garden are just about ready to pick and the bar has now been well and truly raised. So how do I recreate that perfect broad bean dish?

Does one steam them or boil? Obviously you have to pop them out of their grey pods to avoid wading through a dish of saddlebags, but when? What oil do you use? What bacon? What herbs? Do they need lemon juice? The questions are endless, I need answers…

And for my next trick… June 3, 2008

I’ve been watching the drama series Heroes a lot lately – mainly because Mad Men (the best series since Six Feet Under) has now finished. Like Lost, Heroes is basically pants and utterly childish, though everything is delivered with such solemnity that they think they can get away with it. Which they obviously can since this is already series 2 and I, like many other poor souls, have wasted at least 12 hours of my life so far watching it.

 

Anyway, Heroes, for the uninitiated, is about a group of people with superhuman powers ranging from making everyone around them die of a fatal disease to gifts of the more traditional flying and mind-reading variety. Don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but I’m beginning to think I might be similarly gifted. It’s an unusual power, granted, but not without its potential. 

I talk of the ability to make food miraculously disappear. Contemplate the pictures below. How else can you explain how a mountain of broad beans picked in the garden can, when podded, find themselves reduced to this…? (Sceptics should know I can do the same thing with peas)

 

 

We’ve only just legume… May 15, 2008

Introducing the broad pea – a hybrid legume picked so prematurely that it cannot be accurately identified unless under a microscope. What can I say? The broad bean pods looked ready to me, and so did the peas. But then I shelled them. And this is what came out.

 

Despite much resolve, and threats by my partner to remove my secateurs to a padlocked box, I have yet again proved unable to let any crop get to a decent size before I brutally cull it and drag it into the kitchen. Obviously, I have still planned an entire salad supper around these diminutive specimens because That’s What You Do When It’s You What Has Grown Them. Don’t worry, we won’t starve, we have toast.

Green Conundrum No 1

If you buy miniature new potatoes from M&S that have been grown in Spain (back off, local food fascists, mine aren’t ready yet), does that get cancelled out by the fact that the container is 100 per cent compostable? I’m thinking it does…