Heat be damned, I have cooked more in the last week than in the last two months. I’ve tried to carve out time for both shopping and cooking and I have to tell ya, it feels much better. I don’t mean to sound all Suzy Homemaker superior (the universe knows Saint Martha would be appalled by my baseboards) but it’s really that I get sick of restaurant food quickly. And with the heat, all I’ve really wanted to eat was fruit and more fruit. Sadly, the local batshit crazy weather has made even seasonal fruit crazy expensive but we stocked up anyway. I am convinced that it might be possible for me to become a fruititarian. Not to worry about my sanity though really; my family would desert me for the siren call of cow and pig flesh inside a week. In light of that we’ve had brats in beer, a yummy blackberry cobbler, salmon cakes, stir-fried bok choi, teeny marble-sized new potatoes, and ribs and a coffee and ancho rubbed shoulder roast. I won’t my dryer because of the heat but I did crank up my oven. Insanity thy name is hunger.
And for the usual non sequitur, the aforementioned weather and my own laziness prevented any real gardening aside from a leggy thyme plant on the kitchen sill. However, I have been watching Britains of the 1980s re-enacting gardening of the posh Victorian and starving WWII eras. The Victorian Kitchen Garden, The Victorian Kitchen, and the War Garden & Kitchen are fascinating and strangely addictive in that way that can never be fully explained by the anglophilic addict. If you find yourself somewhere loathsomely hot (with electricity and the intrawebs) and some time to kill, you could do worse than watching someone toil in the gray British summer and stifling smoky kitchens of yore. Bonus points added for an adorable ’80s professorial presenter with a spindly mustache in Peter Thoday (I can’t believe he doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia article; he really is fun to watch).
Best of luck to you on the weather crap shoot this summer and safe and happy 4th.
